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I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

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
Four
Postcard
Years
Postcards
Would
Drops
Time
Muse
Like
Ran
Court
Poetry
Scribbled
Especially
Mailman

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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
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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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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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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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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.
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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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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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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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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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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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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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