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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
Englishman
Like
Saint
Englishmen
Created
Viewed
Therefore
Scarcely
Equal
Constitutional
American
Self
Agony
Flagellation
Believe
Atheist
Intelligible
Men
Obligation

More quotes by John Updike

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The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
John Updike
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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
John Updike
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Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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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Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
John Updike
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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
John Updike
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
John Updike
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
John Updike