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A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.


John Updike

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JOHN UPDIKE It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Joh...
CAROL WINDLEY But as the late- seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said, 'To be neutral is r...
ELEANOR HERMAN Sad to think that we won't have any new stories from John Updike, one of the last century's ...
ALAN CHEUSE A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter p...
JOHN UPDIKE I didn't mean to give you the impression that life at the cathedral is like Barchester Towers as wri...
MADELEINE L'ENGLE In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in.
T.S. ELIOT When you think about Puritanism, you must begin by getting rid of the slang term 'Puritanism'...
LELAND RYKEN When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE He's rich," Jack muttered to Eliza, "or connected with rich persons."
"Yes—the clothes, the c...
NEAL STEPHENSON The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
DAVID HARE John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another for...
M. H. ABRAMS To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.’ I’ll improvise.
ISAAC ASIMOV No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly advised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dia...
MICHEL FOUCAULT My house is completely organized from my closets to my drawers.
TIA MOWRY Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry.
A.W. HARE AND J.C. HARE Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.
ANNE ROIPHE Government tends to stifle innovation, and it abhors improvisation. Any good military strategist wil...
BETSY DEVOS The seventeenth-century baby slept, as his nineteenth-century descendant does, in a cradle. Nothing ...
ALICE MORSE EARLE You work in a band, and it tends to be more like moviemaking, I think. It tends to be more of a cons...
LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM Rachel likes open spaces. ... There's only two hallways in this whole house.
DONNIE PLOTNER'S We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century...
ALICE MORSE EARLE The market tends to skim profits. Important people may be involved in the scandal and some skeletons...
CELSO CENISE In the seventeenth century, it was held by some that inside a human sperm there was a minute human b...
JOHN TYLER BONNER Life is a lot like jazz.. it's best when you improvise.
GEORGE GERSHWIN You have to grab moments when they happen. I like to improvise and ad lib.
DENZEL WASHINGTON But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassione...
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.
ISAAC ASIMOV I live in an old house with no closets and no built-ins. I hate big cupboards.
MARTHA STEWART Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise.
GEORGE GERSHWIN If you improvise a riff and the crowd immediately reacts to it, you know you're on to something.
DIMEBAG DARRELL Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise be...
ROBERT REDFORD Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to scien...
BERTRAND RUSSELL Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to scie...
BERTRAND RUSSELL I've been waiting, like, a quarter of century to be a quarter of a century, can you believe it?
GISELE BUNDCHEN In a world where pleasure rules, people tend to be undeveloped in every way. " A House Like a Lotus
MADELEINE L’ENGLE Our minds are like closets. Plain on the outside,but full of colors and thoughts in the inside waiti...
TAYLOR RYAN DANIEL Sometimes we had to improvise. I hate to improvise because I felt like I couldn't find words.
BERENICE BEJO Confident people, who understand comedy, improvise so much better than people who are scared. You ca...
MARLON WAYANS The century which we are entering can be and must be the century of the common man.
HENRY WALLACE I don't write any of my material down. I like to improvise and be spontaneous.
DANE COOK Without this edition, eighteen of Shakespeare's plays including some of his most famous like Macbeth...
PETER SELLEY John had a very slow swing, rather like Luke Donald. It left him short of ammunition.
PETER ALLISS It starts with management and employees and employee morale. We are trying to make the work environm...
JIM MURREN Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John U...
CYNTHIA OZICK A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung...
PETER WESSEL ZAPFFE Most of my contact with John is at the block party we have every summer and our Christmas party. Joh...
DAVID MCGREW if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced Engl...
JHUMPA LAHIRI To modern educated people, it seems obvious that matters of fact are to be ascertained by observatio...
BERTRAND RUSSELL I think honestly procrastination on something like doing taxes tends to be the American past time.
RAPHAEL TULINO A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century.
BRAM STOKER Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed--sometimes it covers you just fine, and ...
JODI PICOULT Josh isn’t in love with me and I’m not in love with him.”
“Sell it to someone who’s b...
KATJA MILLAY We must improvise, and we must experiment, and we must do things that might go wrong, and everything...
FLEA Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.
JOHN C. MAXWELL To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero.
JOHN ROMERO I also think if you're an actor and you can improvise, when you go on an audition and you can improv...
AMY POEHLER You criticize, I improvise.
TOBA BETA Not having finished high school and having been fairly utilitarian in the way I went about college, ...
JOY COVEY She's got a surprisingly good short game and nothing bothers her. But her second nine in the 18-hole...
ANN CURTIS Their athletic director, John Watson, contacted me directly. Ordinarily that would indicate that Lar...
JIM O'DAY It tends to come down very hard for a short period of time. You get caught in a deluge as it really ...
STEVE MILLER You must have traveled all night,” she heard herself say.
“I had to come back early.” Sh...
LISA KLEYPAS Pope John Paul II’s View of the 20th Century,
GEORGE WEIGEL There tends to be a domino effect when you are on a roll on arrests. Often one arrest leads to anoth...
STEVE EVANS Opera is an 18th- and 19th-century art that must find a 20th-century audience.
GOERAN GENTELE It's a lot like if you were to buy a new house and you're moving in ... except in this case the form...
JEFFREY WILLIAMS Herb is the antithesis of Jim. You don't get a lot of frills with Herb.
RICK PITINO On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station a...
MARY ANTIN In-house production must be nourished, must be supported.
PETER FINCHAM We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must b...
BARACK OBAMA For more than a quarter of a century on active duty, my house has been my tent, and my home the batt...
ZACHARY TAYLOR Paul is like John Lennon. They're feisty. There's a rebellious attitude. You know, that's very accep...
ART GARFUNKEL In the seventeenth century, a French missionary in Canada reported a 'strange legend' circul...
ADRIENNE MAYOR It was built on the opinions of experts. Experts who can be wrong; experts who can be manipulated; a...
STACY ULIANA Well, you can't improvise story, which is a fact. If you could, the budget would be insane.
ADAM PALLY I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, wh...
RICK MOODY Conspiracy theories feed on opacity, and that's a longtime problem with short selling. Large lon...
GARY WEISS To the short-sighted, through the fog, God must be a monster.
CRISS JAMI As much as I love heavy riffs, I like The Eagles, Neil Young, Elton John, Crowded House.
ZAKK WYLDE There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning ho...
RAY BRADBURY It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like ...
SAM ROCKWELL I like to improvise; I think it's just a healthy thing to do, to keep everything loose and fun.
ADAM SCOTT I wanted to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here...
CARLOS CASTANEDA My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.
IRWIN SHAW Don't even look until you've closed on the old house. You could fall in love with a house and feel l...
MARCIA WILLIAMS My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You ...
ZADIE SMITH Your life and leadership must be like a masterpiece you create on daily basis when the brush passes ...
IRENE GOODWILL Like you, I look forward to a second Alberta century.
ADRIENNE CLARKSON The modern mind tends to be more and more critical and analytical in spirit, hence it must devise fo...
EDWARD SAPIR I don't see John Roberts reaching out and having to confront and pronounce on that issue unless he m...
AMY WAX Like the wreckage of a house after a hurricane, the wreckage of a life must be cleaned up before a n...
JIM GENOVESE The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster way back in the 19th century, and somehow it ...
TIMOTHY NOAH Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls i...
JOSEPH CONRAD We must maintain the integrity of the White House, and that integrity must be real, not transparent....
RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, just as a palace is m...
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the othe...
W. H. AUDEN

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JOHN UPDIKE Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main mater...
JOHN UPDIKE The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a super...
JOHN UPDIKE Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more...
JOHN UPDIKE Ich habe in diesen Tagen viel über Liebe nachgedacht, und darüber, wie ich das Wort hasste und es ...
JOHN UPDIKE But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a sta...
JOHN UPDIKE We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted h...
JOHN UPDIKE Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family t...
JOHN UPDIKE What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating ...
JOHN UPDIKE In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a d...
JOHN UPDIKE If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
JOHN UPDIKE In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of ru...
JOHN UPDIKE There's something very reassuring... about the written record.
JOHN UPDIKE …he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like li...
JOHN UPDIKE I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over...
JOHN UPDIKE If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extincti...
JOHN UPDIKE For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic ...
JOHN UPDIKE I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside o...
JOHN UPDIKE John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although ...
JOHN UPDIKE Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.
JOHN UPDIKE My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and uns...
JOHN UPDIKE He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red f...
JOHN UPDIKE Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
JOHN UPDIKE I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true.
JOHN UPDIKE Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It's not that you get better ideas, the old ones just g...
JOHN UPDIKE