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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.

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
Good
Written
Reserve
Things
Though
Reserves
Life
Hours
Habits
Write
Actual
Writing
Develop
Even
Busy
Trying
Hour
Work
Habit

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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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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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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
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History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
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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.
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
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There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
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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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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
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