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

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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
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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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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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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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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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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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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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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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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.
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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
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