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

More quotes by John Updike

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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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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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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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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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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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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.
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
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Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
John Updike
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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
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I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
John Updike
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
John Updike
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To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike
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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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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
John Updike