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John Updike Quotes
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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
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The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.
John Updike
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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.
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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You offer cheer to tiny Man 'Mid galaxies Gargantuan A little pill in endless night, An antidote to cosmic fright.
White Dwarf
John Updike
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
John Updike
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Those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display.
John Updike
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I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
John Updike
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You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right.
John Updike
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.
John Updike
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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
John Updike
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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
John Updike
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The Milky Way, which used to be thought of as the path by which the souls of the dead traveled to Heaven, is an optical illusion; you could never reach it. Like fog, it would always thin out around you. It's a mist of stars we make by looking the long way through the galaxy.
John Updike
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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You need no more or less than three dimensions to make a knot, a knot that tightens on itself and won't pull apart, and that's what the ultimate particles are — knots in space-time. You can't make a knot in two dimensions because there's no over or under.
John Updike
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Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.
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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My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.
John Updike
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
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
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god
years
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women
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