Poems List

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that mankind has invented yet.
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Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.
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Pigs at a pastry cart.
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Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
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A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
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By bedside and easy chair, books promise a cozy, swift, and silent release from this world into another, with no current involved but the free and scarcely detectable crackle of brain cells.
1
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
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The artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and … he does it without destroying something else.

George Plimpton (ed.) Writers at Work (4th series, 1977) ch. 16

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Neutrinos, they are very small

They have no charge and have no mass

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John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1932. Throughout his prolific career, he published over twenty novels, ten short story collections, and several books of poetry and essays. He is particularly famous for his novel series about the character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, which includes "Rabbit, Run" (1960), "Rabbit Redux" (1971), "Rabbit Is Rich" (1981), and "Rabbit at Rest" (1990). Updike received numerous literary awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction. His detailed and lyrical writing established him as one of the great stylists of American literature. He died in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009.