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A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

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
Consciousness
Turns
Self
Much
Scorned
Really
Outward
Mode
Inevitably
Writer

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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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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.
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As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
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President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
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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 Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
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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 took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
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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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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
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Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
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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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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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