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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

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
Cake
Irony
Way
Appearing

More quotes by John Updike

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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
John Updike
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
John Updike
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Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
John Updike
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
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We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
John Updike
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
John Updike
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The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
John Updike
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike