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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

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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
Fondly
Standards
Steadily
Living
Keep
Choir
Spirit
Medieval
Even
Modest
Shyly
Trying
Panic
Sculpted
Work
Seats
Carver
Standard

More quotes by John Updike

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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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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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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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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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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
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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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We are fated to love one another we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
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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.
John Updike
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
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I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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 breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
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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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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
John Updike
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You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
John Updike