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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

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
Live
Giving
Mozart
Permission
Gives
Music

More quotes by John Updike

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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
John Updike
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Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
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The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
John Updike
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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
John Updike
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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
John Updike
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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
John Updike
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To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike
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Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John Updike
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
John Updike
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
John Updike
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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
John Updike
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Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
John Updike
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
John Updike