Quote

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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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
Like
Agreement
Illusion
Reader
Emotional
Writer
Story
Footnotes
Stories
Drops
Life
Temperature

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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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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.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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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.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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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.
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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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Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
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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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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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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.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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