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Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.

— John Updike Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)

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More quotes by John Updike

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Buchanan Dying : A Play (1974)

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.

On T. S. Eliot (1984)

Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Updike (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.