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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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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
Struggle
Strain
Family
Chief
Felt
Chiefs
True
Basically
America
Window
Life
Conflict
Strains
Childhood
Conflicts
Beginning
Struggles

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The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
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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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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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Human was the music, natural was the static.
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
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The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
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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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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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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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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
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