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

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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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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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Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
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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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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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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
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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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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.
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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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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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