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

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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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Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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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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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
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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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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
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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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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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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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