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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
Mortals
Failed
Loyalty
Therefore
Failure
Profoundest
Goes
Losers
Men
Mortal
Loser

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Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
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Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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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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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
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I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
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The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
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