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

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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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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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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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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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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
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The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
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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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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
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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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Fraud makes the world go round.
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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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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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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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There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
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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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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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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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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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