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The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.

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
Less
Selves
Spirit
Crowd
Light
Crowds
Doe
Essential
Self
Essentials
Solutions
Solitariness
Seek
Dreaded
England
Welcomed

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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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We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
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There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
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There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
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Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
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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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If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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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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