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The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.

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
World
Material
Compound
Materials
Compounds
Strange
Pillars
Upon
Erotic
Makes
Emphasis
Spirit
Throat
Needs
Leap
Pulsing
Life
Direction
Pillar

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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
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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.
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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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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
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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 - 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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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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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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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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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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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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