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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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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
Point
Finish
Certain
Bear
Something
Finished
Things
Heavy
Bears
Painting
Beyond
Dead
Finishing

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Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
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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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Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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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.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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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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The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
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