John Updike Quotes
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Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being 'somebody,' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
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From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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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.
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That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
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Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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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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If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
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Harry, to Nelson 'Don't forget, there's a Depression coming.'
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Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
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'Did Nelson ever tell you the story,' Pru asks Annabelle, 'how he lost the agency up his nose?'
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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Nelson '...People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little.'
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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Harry having drawn at golf The shape of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn't soaked in disgrace?
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Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.
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He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame.
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It rots a writer’s brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.
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There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
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He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.
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We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
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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.'