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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

John Updike

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John Updike
Age: 76 †
Born: 1932
Born: March 18
Died: 2009
Died: January 27
Art Critic
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
John Hoyer Updike
Loyalty
Therefore
Failure
Profoundest
Goes
Losers
Men
Mortal
Loser
Mortals
Failed

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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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Human was the music, natural was the static.
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