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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.

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
Age
Witnesses
Littles
Cared
Little
Watched
Like
Witness
Early
Ones
Lose
Loses

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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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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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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
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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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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
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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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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
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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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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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