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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.

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
Might
Invited
Morning
Talk
Shows

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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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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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There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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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.
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
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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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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
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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.
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
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The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
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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.
John Updike