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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.

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
Pigs
Delicate
Gobbled
Prepared
Anticipatory
Pleasure
Congruence
Littles
Pastry
Little
Pastries
Cart
Carts

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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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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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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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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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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.
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The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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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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Human was the music, natural was the static.
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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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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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