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

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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
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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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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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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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You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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Human was the music, natural was the static.
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There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
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One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
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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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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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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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