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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.

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
Car
Always
Guess
Failure
Walking
Tightrope
Race
Producing
Chance
Unnecessary
Driving
Makes
Totally
Something

More quotes by John Updike

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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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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
John Updike
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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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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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
John Updike
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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?
John Updike
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Human was the music, natural was the static.
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
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The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
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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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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
John Updike
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
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Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
John Updike