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"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."
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"A goatee is to beards what diamonds are to ornaments."
"It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building."
"They wore their strange beauty like war paint."
"The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude."
"I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more."
"A slight deviation form what we would think of as symmetry gives us a bit more information and the mind seems to enjoy this stimulation because it is always looking for value. Beauty is a slight deviation from expectation."
"Beauty is subjective. You know how sometimes what makes a person attractive is the way they make you laugh or how it seems like they can read your mind?"
"Everyone wants a little bit of something beautiful."
"Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice."
"I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"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."
"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas."
"I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it."
"There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't."
"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 ..."
"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."
"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."
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