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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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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
Experience
Immortality
Light
Complexes
Love
Complex
World
Witness
Interval
Selfish
Intervals
Opposite
Afterlife
Opposites
Yearning
Praise
Privileged

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Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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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.
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There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
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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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The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
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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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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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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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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
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