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I've never much enjoyed going to plays…The unreality of painted people standing on a platform saying things they've said to each other for months is more than I can overlook.
John Updike
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A soggy little island huffing and puffing to keep up with Western Europe.
Of England
John Updike
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The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
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Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.
John Updike
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
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In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck 'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself.
John Updike
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So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.
John Updike
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[Harry to Janice, about the financial situation] "... You're in real trouble."
John Updike
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[Thelma] "... You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."
John Updike
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When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.
John Updike
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[Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away.] "That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"
John Updike
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[Nelson, about Harry] "I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. [...] But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way."
John Updike
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
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[Thelma] "... We're too old to keep being foolish."
John Updike
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[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?
John Updike
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[Pru] "... He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal."
John Updike
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... This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same.
John Updike
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I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.
John Updike
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History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
John Updike
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Writers take words seriously — perhaps 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.
John Updike
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and…he does it without destroying something else.
John Updike
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The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.
John Updike
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I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
John Updike
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It's not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
John Updike
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I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
John Updike
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Quote of the day
Joy is like restless day; but peace divine Like quiet night; Lead me, O Lord, — till perfect Day shall shine Through Peace to Light.
Adelaide Anne Procter
John Updike
1960s © W. Earl Snyder
Born:
March 18, 1932
Died:
January 27, 2009
(aged 76)
Bio:
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.
Known for:
Rabbit, Run (1960)
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Rabbit Is Rich (1981)
Rabbit Redux (1971)
The Centaur (1963)
Most used words:
people
life
time
feel
love
men
nelson
golf
god
years
kind
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women
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parents
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