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

More quotes by John Updike

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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
John Updike
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Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
John Updike
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Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
John Updike
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Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.
John Updike
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
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Human was the music, natural was the static.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
John Updike
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
John Updike
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
John Updike
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
John Updike
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In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
John Updike
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
John Updike
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We are fated to love one another we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
John Updike
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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
John Updike
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Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike