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

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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
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Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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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.
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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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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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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
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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.
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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
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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.
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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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