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

More quotes by John Updike

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If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
John Updike
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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
John Updike
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
John Updike
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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
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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.
John Updike
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The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
John Updike
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The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
John Updike
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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
John Updike
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There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
John Updike
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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
John Updike
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
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Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
John Updike
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike
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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
John Updike
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
John Updike
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Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
John Updike