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Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

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
Another
Attitude
Radio
Impossibilities
Persons
Playing
Generation
Gauge
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Fire
Rules
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Treading
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Toward
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Songs
Attitudes
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Possibility
Possibilities
Shows
Generations
Wars

More quotes by John Updike

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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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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
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The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
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Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
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The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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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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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
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Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
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Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
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Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.
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Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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