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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
Smell
Failure
Never
Life
Like
Smoke

More quotes by John Updike

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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
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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.
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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Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
John Updike
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Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
John Updike
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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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.
John Updike
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The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
John Updike
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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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
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To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
John Updike
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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
John Updike
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
John Updike
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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
John Updike
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
John Updike
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
John Updike
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
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The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
John Updike