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

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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 guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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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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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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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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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.
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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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There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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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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