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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.

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
Public
Privacy
Passion
Essential
Possible
Essentials
Interest
Private
Thought
Concern
Seems
Essence
Widest
Government
Study
Humanities
Humanity
Publicity

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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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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.
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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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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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike
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In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
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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.
John Updike
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Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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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.
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Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
John Updike
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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
John Updike
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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
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I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
John Updike