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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.

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
Open
Intimacy
Denver
Feeling
Finds
Thriving
Pleasure
Plus
Antiques
American
Washington
Charmed
Business
London
Francisco
Feelings
York
Combined
Reminiscent
Cannot
City
Boston
Spacious
Certain
Cities
Impressed
Antique

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We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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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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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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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
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The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
John Updike
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Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
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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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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike
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The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
John Updike
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It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
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Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
John Updike
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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike