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" New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. "
John Updike
Return
Exile
He
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" I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.' "
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" Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. "
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" Gods don't answer letters. "
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" Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon. "
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" In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "
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" The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. "
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" My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. "
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" We are most alive when we're in love. "
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" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "
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Alone
Leaves
" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "
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" Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. "
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People
Change
Facts
" Authors should be honored only for their works. "
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Honored
Only
Should
" Nature refuses to rest. "
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Rest
Nature
Refuses
" When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me. "
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Tree
Age
Early
" We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills. "
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Artist
Only
Skills
" My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. "
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Far Away
Away
Live
" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "
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Looking
World
Publishers
" Humor is my default mode. "
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Mode
Humor
Default
" Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. "
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America
Tax
Reagan
" My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care. "
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Beautiful
Life
Language
" A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "
John Updike
Year
Patience
Healthy
" People are incorrigibly themselves. "
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People
Themselves
" We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. "
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After
Except
Survive
" We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort. "
John Updike
Art
Spiritual
Respect
" New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. "
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Space
New
Disaster
" To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. "
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Freedom
Happiness
Individual
" Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses. "
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Living
Happy
Experience
" By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. "
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Thought
Sea
" Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. "
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" My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity. "
John Updike
Host
Loved
Year