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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.

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
Little
General
Puritan
Self
Behinds
Metaphors
Work
Behind
Surreal
Takes
Ethic
American
Exaggeration
Exaggerations
Use
Indulgence
Parisian
Art
Metaphor
Surrealism
Littles
Ethics
Playful

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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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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.
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
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The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
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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.
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A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
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Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
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