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

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Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
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The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
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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.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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