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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.
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
Obligation
Families
Getting
Family
Everything
Way
Always
Tangle
Imagined
More quotes by John Updike
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
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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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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
John Updike
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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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
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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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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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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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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
John Updike
In no other sport must the spectator move.
John Updike
The great thing about the dead, they make space.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
