John Updike
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"John Hoyer Updike" was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.

Updike's most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and the novella "Rabbit Remembered"), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Rabbit Angstrom/Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1982) and Rabbit At Rest (1990) were recognized with the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction/Pulitzer Prize. Updike is one of only three authors (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.

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We are most alive when we're in love.

Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

The music was human; the static was natural.