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

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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from 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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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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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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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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I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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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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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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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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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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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
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