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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
Read
Care
Poets
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Poet
Danger
Poetry
Becoming
Fiction

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I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
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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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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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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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Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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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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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
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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.
John Updike
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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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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
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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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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
John Updike
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As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
John Updike
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Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
John Updike
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When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
John Updike