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

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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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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.
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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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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.
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Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
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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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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.
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We are fated to love one another we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
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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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Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
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