Quote

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

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Fraud makes the world go round.
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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
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When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
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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.
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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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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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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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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
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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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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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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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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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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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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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