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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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"I would wear pink because I knew my future was anything but rosy. I would accessorize myself to the hilt, and I would wear flirty shoes because my world needed more beauty to counter all the ugliness in it. I would wear pink because I hated gray, I didn't deserve white, and I was sick of black."
"Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language."
"There is nothing more beautiful than the light of a Candle and the Aroma of it's Heart."
"Well, I've always been interested in approaching a big city in a train, and I can't exactly describe the sensations, but they're entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics."
"Purposefully look for something beautiful today."
"I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow."
"Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity " I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly."
"Not lovelier. But a different kind of loveliness. There are so many kinds of loveliness."
"As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead."
"There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser."
"There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals."
"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."
"No matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong - you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into."
"Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly."
"My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy."
"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."
"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."
"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."
"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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