Quote

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

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
Light
Sharp
Indoor
Littles
Pale
Blinking
Look
Ghost
Outdoor
Little
Instant
Overcomes
Looks
Overcoming
Clinging
Men
Plant
Ghosts
Constant
Printing
Four
Emerge

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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
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I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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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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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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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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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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Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
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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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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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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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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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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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