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We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.

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
Black
Mutual
Littles
Loving
Little
Planet
Nothing
Planets
Like
Blue
Lies
Upheld
Space
Reassurance
Lying
Hung

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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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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.
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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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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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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
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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.
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
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