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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

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
Use
Uses
Wells
Accidents
Well
Victim
Self
Mercy
Work
Writer
Life
Thousand
Control
Actuality
Creative
Presentation

More quotes by John Updike

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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
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The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
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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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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
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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.
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It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
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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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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.
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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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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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