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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

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
Still
Country
World
Homesick
Russia
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More quotes by John Updike

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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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The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
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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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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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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.
John Updike
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike
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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
John Updike
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Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
John Updike
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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
John Updike
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Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
John Updike
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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
John Updike