Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
John Updike
Related Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another ... JOHN UPDIKE John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another for... M. H. ABRAMS Greet the sun every morning as though it's your best friend. Dance in the rain as though you are dan... SARA STRAIN My favorite thing is to be alone in a room with a blank paper in front of me and the time to fill it... DIRK BENEDICT I still get up every morning at 4 A.M. I write seven days a week, including Christmas. And I still f... DAN BROWN Leroy Marsh and John Friend made me what I am today, DENNIS FLYNN From now on, this administration will find it difficult to muster support on the right without expla... DAVID KEENE John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike... LAURA LIPPMAN To awaken each morning with a smile brightening my face; to greet the day withreverence for the oppo... THOMAS DEKKER Blank paper has always inspired me. DANIEL HANDLER To awaken each morning with a smile brightening my face; to greet the day with reverence for the... THOMAS DEKKER We start each day with a blank sheet of paper in front of us, and what we write on it is up to us. JOHN LARKIN We're beginning with a blank sheet of paper. BOB BARRETT Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I a... GUSTAVE FLAUBERT The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful ... THEODORE DALRYMPLE It's really cool to see your work progress through each stage. That is the most exciting part for me... AMELIA HORTON So, though I'll greet an agreement with happiness, ... I won't drop my guard. GERSHOM GORENBERG Normality wasn't in the days I'd left behind me: it was only to be found in whatever fortune placed ... MARíA DUEñAS When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE St John, on Christ's bosom, pray for me in the days of my discipleship, in the house of my faith, in... ERIC MILNER-WHITE I have my outlet for my humor through my characters, and I also have the intimacy of rapport with my... FLIP WILSON What I always studied in screenwriting from my mentor John Glavin was that the most interesting char... MIKE BIRBIGLIA Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a... NEIL GAIMAN I can muster up the courage in the difficult situations to get me through. MEGYN KELLY May I never neither turn left nor turn right in my journey of life, but may I go straight to Christ ... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH I am quite sane, according to my three distinct personalities and my seven passive ones. THE PAPER DOLL In the morning when I wake And the sun is coming through, Oh, you fill my lungs with sweet... THE PAPER KITES She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each ... AYN RAND Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the fin... EDWARD STEICHEN Greet one another with a holy kiss BIBLE What is important is the reliability of my posts being there to greet my fans with a smile or a gigg... GEORGE TAKEI I'd come to the country to do my Thoreau bit, so I needed an office that looked out onto the woo... DAVID MIXNER The city of San Francisco engulfed their view through the front windshield. The dazzling light of th... VICTORIA KAHLER Greet every morning with open arms and say thanks every night with a full heart. Each day is a preci... REGINA BRETT A misty morning does not signify a cloudy day. PROVERB Sad to think that we won't have any new stories from John Updike, one of the last century's ... ALAN CHEUSE My dad swims with me in the morning. He swims with old buddies of his. I've always had connections w... JAKE EDWARDS The ceaseless rain is falling fast,
And yonder gilded vane,
Immovable for three days past,
... HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW Where were you fellows when the paper was blank? FRED ALLEN we have made enough progress over the past two days that the union is willing to continue working wh... GEORGE BECKER I'm always willing to endure humiliation on behalf of my characters. BEN STILLER The problem with me is that nothing embarrasses me. DAVID HASSELHOFF What's the meaning of life? Other people. JOHN GREEN For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your ... PATTI SMITH I didn't mean to give you the impression that life at the cathedral is like Barchester Towers as wri... MADELEINE L'ENGLE Acting has always been a way for me to express myself, and show all my vulnerabilities and flaws thr... ALEXIA FAST Dedication is writing your name on the botoom of a blank sheet of paper and handling it to the Lord ... RICK RENNER From the Kindle Book Reflections in the Mirror of Life: “In a slum somewhere in India As... THE PROPHET OF LIFE If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem. JOHN UPDIKE The challenges our state faces must be met with the best solutions and ideas we can muster - and goo... MAGGIE HASSAN I don't define lust as anything evil or nasty. Lust as defined by me, is the feeling of desire: a de... C. JOYBELL C. The unfortunate thing is that, sometimes, we slip, but, fortunately, consciously or unconsciously, w... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH Seagull you fly against the horizon
Into a misty morning sun
Seagull you must have known
The shape o... MEMBERS OF BAD COMPANY Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with m... STELLA ATRIUM I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper. STEVE MARTIN You can walk in a dream while you are awake: Just walk in the misty morning of a forest! MEHMET MURAT ILDAN A piece of blank paper is always a place of good intentions. ANTHONY T.HINCKS This is my favorite part of the day. “Good morning, Class Two C,” I say. The entire class leaps ... JAMIE ZEPPA The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my charac... ANNE RICE It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Joh... CAROL WINDLEY I came to the conclusion a while ago that there is nothing romantic or supernatural about loving som... JOHN GREEN Jejeune bent to look out the window again. There was not a single body of land between here and the ... STEVE BURROWS When some guy shows up with a shopping bag full of records and CD's and wants me to sign every o... JIMMY CARL BLACK Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling. WALT WHITMAN Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling. WALT WHITMAN Give me the splendid, silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling. WALT WHITMAN If you look at my body of work, my characters drastically vary, and so I typically don't play th... TONI TRUCKS No my friend, darkness is not everywhere, for here and there I find faces illuminated from within; p... CAROLE BORGES Peter must have thought, "Who am I compared to Mr. Faithfulness (John)?" But Jesus clarified the iss... CHARLES R. SWINDOLL We go through an unbelievable amount of paper targets each year. We have hundreds of kids shooting e... BUD BOWMAN Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's... ROBIN HOBB Electric telegraphs, printing, gas,
Tobacco, balloons, and steam,
Are little events that have ... HENRY S. LEIGH They are not, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dream, Our path emerges for a while, then ... ERNEST DOWSON (All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes... JEAN SASSON I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. T... PETE HAMILL Greet each man with peace, and leave each man with love. Ask yourself - One more enemy, or one more ... SUZY KASSEM Loving someone who never loved you, is like remembering a face you never saw. No matter how har... RATISH EDWARDS My poor vision gives me a soft-focus morning. For the first half hour, I kind of wander through my h... CARRIE ANN INABA Each soul must awaken from the aloneness of a private dream world to greet the morning sun, view the... KILROY J. OLDSTER Hey girl, I saw the Apostle Paul and he said for you to greet me with a holy kiss. MATTHEW PIERCE Let me wake up next to you, have coffee in the morning and wander through the city with your hand in... CHARLOTTE ERIKSSON Poetry is painting with words where you create a masterpiece by spilling your feelings and emotions ... AVIJEET DAS May we greet each other with a smile, hug and speak kind words. LAILAH GIFTY AKITA God bless my daddy, ... He was the genius who created this wonderful menagerie of characters. A monk... DEAN YOUNG How should I know?" said Alice, surprised at her own courage. "It's no business of mine." The Q... LEWIS CARROLL Monday, it's back to the rain. Another wet, long-lasting rainmaker moves in Monday morning and stays... BRUCE SUSSMAN Im waiting, for what, my kind of people, what kind is that, i can tell my kind of people by their fa... AYN RAND Each morning I sit down at the computer ... there's another country, another outbreak or another hum... NANCY COX My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold, and a... CORMAC MCCARTHY Edgar asked me, 'Do you know anything about John Lennon,' ... I said, 'I know everything about John ... DON SCARDINO People imagine that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin arrived in Yalta with a blank sheet of paper to ... WINSTON CHURCHILL Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other. EMILE M. CIORAN Inside this great Universe,you will find many pulsating characters;The rich & the poor,the positive ... DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) "Man wants but little here below
Nor wants that little long,"
'Tis not with me exactly so;
... JOHN QUINCY ADAMS Life before consciousness was like blank paper, so be it. SANTOSH KALWAR Sappho isn't really meant to be read. It's meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, als... ALEXANDER CHEE Thankfully, the farmers understand my request that the children not be allowed to peer through the w... KATE BERNHEIMER Then you've made the only choice. But there's a penalty attached, as there is to most things you wan... MARGARET MITCHELL I have had playmates, I have had companions; In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days - All... CHARLES LAMB I have had playmates, I have had companions; In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days - All... CHARLES LAMB
More John Updike
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JOHN UPDIKE In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, w... JOHN UPDIKE Sex is like money; only too much is enough. JOHN UPDIKE To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a... JOHN UPDIKE Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. JOHN UPDIKE I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the... JOHN UPDIKE Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle. JOHN UPDIKE It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect l... JOHN UPDIKE School is where you go between when your parents can't take you, and industry can't take you. JOHN UPDIKE The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we a... JOHN UPDIKE I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago,... JOHN UPDIKE If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines... JOHN UPDIKE By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. JOHN UPDIKE Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. JOHN UPDIKE Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings. JOHN UPDIKE To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungratef... JOHN UPDIKE Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who ... JOHN UPDIKE It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of ... JOHN UPDIKE Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being. JOHN UPDIKE A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's p... JOHN UPDIKE The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. JOHN UPDIKE For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do -- the... JOHN UPDIKE Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual pos... JOHN UPDIKE The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic de... JOHN UPDIKE Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better. JOHN UPDIKE When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we ar... JOHN UPDIKE Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that w... JOHN UPDIKE Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts ... JOHN UPDIKE Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality. JOHN UPDIKE Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When... JOHN UPDIKE Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them. JOHN UPDIKE Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; a... JOHN UPDIKE We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. JOHN UPDIKE Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. JOHN UPDIKE It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinate... JOHN UPDIKE It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do... JOHN UPDIKE Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watche... JOHN UPDIKE Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, an... JOHN UPDIKE But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged th... JOHN UPDIKE Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. JOHN UPDIKE Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. JOHN UPDIKE I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can,... JOHN UPDIKE The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. JOHN UPDIKE My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. JOHN UPDIKE Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. JOHN UPDIKE We are most alive when we're in love. JOHN UPDIKE Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. JOHN UPDIKE Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another ... JOHN UPDIKE Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky wa... JOHN UPDIKE Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open se... JOHN UPDIKE Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. JOHN UPDIKE Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. JOHN UPDIKE Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer c... JOHN UPDIKE The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. JOHN UPDIKE I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. Afte... JOHN UPDIKE All love comes from the family. JOHN UPDIKE Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoym... JOHN UPDIKE We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull,... JOHN UPDIKE Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. JOHN UPDIKE America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is free... JOHN UPDIKE American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic ... JOHN UPDIKE Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumpe... JOHN UPDIKE I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is ... JOHN UPDIKE What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. JOHN UPDIKE The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and th... JOHN UPDIKE The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is wh... JOHN UPDIKE It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. JOHN UPDIKE A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter p... JOHN UPDIKE It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. JOHN UPDIKE A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvis... JOHN UPDIKE To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungratef... JOHN UPDIKE By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and s... JOHN UPDIKE Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. JOHN UPDIKE All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so. JOHN UPDIKE As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas br... JOHN UPDIKE Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable... JOHN UPDIKE In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview.... JOHN UPDIKE A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within th... JOHN UPDIKE The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. JOHN UPDIKE Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. JOHN UPDIKE The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your s... JOHN UPDIKE Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a... JOHN UPDIKE To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the s... JOHN UPDIKE Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by t... JOHN UPDIKE Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy re... JOHN UPDIKE Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. JOHN UPDIKE Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. JOHN UPDIKE Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no s... JOHN UPDIKE The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolifi... JOHN UPDIKE Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell ... JOHN UPDIKE The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied... JOHN UPDIKE I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of ... JOHN UPDIKE I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I did... JOHN UPDIKE I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip nove... JOHN UPDIKE The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what d... JOHN UPDIKE Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being. JOHN UPDIKE America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. JOHN UPDIKE We are most alive when we're in love. JOHN UPDIKE Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. JOHN UPDIKE Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. JOHN UPDIKE Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart. JOHN UPDIKE Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having rea... JOHN UPDIKE The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty... JOHN UPDIKE You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it ... JOHN UPDIKE I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get fo... JOHN UPDIKE Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. JOHN UPDIKE There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the n... JOHN UPDIKE Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plu... JOHN UPDIKE He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous sy... JOHN UPDIKE For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they ... JOHN UPDIKE The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. JOHN UPDIKE Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. JOHN UPDIKE A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its descripti... JOHN UPDIKE In his field - where edge, zip and instant impact are sine qua non - Kidd is second to none. JOHN UPDIKE For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. JOHN UPDIKE He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a b... JOHN UPDIKE Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other JOHN UPDIKE In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-b... JOHN UPDIKE From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are s... JOHN UPDIKE There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which th... JOHN UPDIKE Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; a... JOHN UPDIKE What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit. JOHN UPDIKE The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'Th... JOHN UPDIKE Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigora... JOHN UPDIKE I have never liked haircuts. JOHN UPDIKE New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively mainta... JOHN UPDIKE Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the en... JOHN UPDIKE Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-cen... JOHN UPDIKE I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science ... JOHN UPDIKE Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his wor... JOHN UPDIKE Doctorow here appears not so much a re-constructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past ... JOHN UPDIKE Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until... JOHN UPDIKE Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to stee... JOHN UPDIKE Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longe... JOHN UPDIKE Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. JOHN UPDIKE I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, ... JOHN UPDIKE Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having rea... JOHN UPDIKE Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it al... JOHN UPDIKE All sunshine without a little rain makes a desert. JOHN UPDIKE "Upon shaving off one's beard." The scissors cut the long-grown hair; the razor scrapes the remnant ... JOHN UPDIKE A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or... JOHN UPDIKE Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism JOHN UPDIKE If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem. JOHN UPDIKE The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is ... JOHN UPDIKE On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly pu... JOHN UPDIKE Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains. JOHN UPDIKE I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights... JOHN UPDIKE Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flour... JOHN UPDIKE Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to ou... JOHN UPDIKE Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watche... JOHN UPDIKE Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. JOHN UPDIKE Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying JOHN UPDIKE The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So t... JOHN UPDIKE Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating noti... JOHN UPDIKE An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they ... JOHN UPDIKE His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes... JOHN UPDIKE I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and... JOHN UPDIKE We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, becaus... JOHN UPDIKE The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just start... JOHN UPDIKE A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of r... 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