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To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

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
Around
Fellow
States
Obligation
Human
Fellows
Humans
Dreams
Appetites
Men
State
Obligations
Social
Realities
Reality
Appetite
Dream
Tension

More quotes by John Updike

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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
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The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
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Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
John Updike
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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
John Updike
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike
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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
John Updike
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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
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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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
John Updike
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
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One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
John Updike
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
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In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
John Updike
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
John Updike