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The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
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
Like
Saint
Englishman
Created
Englishmen
Therefore
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Scarcely
American
Constitutional
Self
Agony
Believe
Atheist
Flagellation
Men
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Intelligible
More quotes by John Updike
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
John Updike
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike
It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
John Updike
Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
John Updike
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
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
John Updike
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John Updike
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John Updike
The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
John Updike
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
John Updike
Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
John Updike
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
John Updike
Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
John Updike
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
John Updike
Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.
John Updike
