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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
Pleasure
Congruence
Littles
Pastry
Little
Pastries
Cart
Carts
Pigs

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Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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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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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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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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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.
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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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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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