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Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

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
Danger
Poetry
Becoming
Fiction
Read
Care
Poets
Kind
Writers
Poet

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Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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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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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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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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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.
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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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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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