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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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Exlpore more Identity quotes
"We are all worms but I do believe that I am a glow-worm."
"Songs of myselfI am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,.."
"Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were."
"Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that."
"She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two."
"But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone."
"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."
"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."
"A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience."
"But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography."
"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."
"Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper."
"She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ..."
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