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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.

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
Never
Life
Like
Smoke
Smell
Failure

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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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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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As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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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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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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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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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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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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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike