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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.

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
Everything
Lovers
Even
Rest
Kind
Becomes
Things
Movie
Love
Nice
Anew
Think
Rather
Flat
Thinking
Funny
Flats
Life
Makes
Lover

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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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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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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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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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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
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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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Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
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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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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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