The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t—whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike
Related
Reasons... questions... what they have in common?
- All get finded in the hard way.
DEYTH BANGER You often love someone not for what they are, but for what you are when you are with them.
JEFFREY FRY She buys "mixed salad greens" for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get...
RUDOLPH DELSON The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe, don’...
BOHDI SANDERS Who cares what THEY think, what do YOU think? You can't control others' perception of you, so just b...
DAN O'DONNELL They know what they want, but aren't sure how to find it.
JAMES C. DOBSON The words I'm singing now
Mean nothing more than meow to an animal
THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS They will go in thinking they can win. But to their credit, they do they best they can do with what ...
CATHY ALEXANDER Now they have a riddle.
- Criminal Minds
DEYTH BANGER And what do they want!?
DEYTH BANGER One of the highlights of the first Good Omens tour was Neil and I walking through New York singing S...
TERRY PRATCHETT They are distractions, but they are distractions for those three individuals more than anyone else. ...
BRUCE ALLEN John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike...
LAURA LIPPMAN Difficulty? It's impossible. Are they afraid the tourists will leave if they know they are being spr...
RUTH FISHER Ques eso? Queso?
NOLAN J. VANDER HAAGEN People don’t want to be millionaires — they want to experience what they believe only millions c...
TIMOTHY FERRISS It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes abo...
FLANNERY O'CONNOR The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it w...
EDMUND BURKE The deadline is set and they think I am their pet.
SANTOSH KALWAR What matters is the one thing I do know for certain: God is with me.
CRAIG GROESCHEL ... people, who always look for what they don’t have, don’t see what they have and dream of what...
ANI CHIBUKHCHYAN Our main difficulty, as before, is what will happen, supposedly, if India releases the prisoners. Wh...
ABDUL WAKIL MUTTAWAKIL People will believe what they want to believe
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN Seems like everyone's an actor or an actor's best friend, I wonder what was wrong to begin with that...
ANI DIFRANCO People love the facade of a perfection relationship because perfection seems alluring. What they don...
DOMINIC RICCITELLO What Fucks me... is that we both are the same... we all walk on the same path... but everything is a...
DEYTH BANGER First they don’t understand what they ought to understand; then they make others understand what t...
ANUJ SOMANY When people believe that what you believe is what they believe, they turn you into a belief.
MICHAEL BASSEY JOHNSON Never ever compare yourself with other people. They may have what you don’t have; you also have wh...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR Far too many people have no idea of what they can do because all they have been told is what they ca...
ZIG ZIGLAR I've found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new t...
PETER DEMIANOVICH OUSPENSKY What the culture of get rich quick does to our people is People forget that they have to create thei...
SUNDAY ADELAJA People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe.
ANDY ROONEY What really allows us to do that is they are having a good time and believe in what they are doing. ...
DALLAS ROBINSON They had been with their families from yesterday, but they were too scared to come out. They were ab...
ARJUNAN ETHIRVEERASINGAM It has been a fantastic year. It is always fun to win, but to win with a group like these kids makes...
JEF FIELD With the indie kids you have to remember this: they really think that what they do matters in some w...
JOHN NIVEN Mass advertising can help build brands, but authenticity is what makes them last. If people believe ...
HOWARD SCHULTZ I think the only way to go is to do what they think is the right thing and explain it as well as the...
HENRY KISSINGER The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to...
MICHAEL SANDEL I believe that the jury in this case did the right thing, and we are obviously very happy with the r...
DAVID HOOSE We will plug away. We just have to work with what we have and suck it up. Credit New Mexico for stic...
BARRY GORMAN When push comes to shove would people do what they felt was right, to get justice done or would they...
GARY F EVANS... Believe what you believe and it will be,
believe what others believe and they will consume you...
STANLEY VICTOR PASKAVICH Credit is what enables people to spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t need t...
VIKRANT PARSAI They say I'm a revolutionary, but they're all wrong.
RALPH BAKSHI They say miracles are past.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE They Learn to speak... and when they were at level "AVERAGE", they started making the rules and star...
DEYTH BANGER "Always love people for who they are, not for whom you like them to be." ~ Tom Baker
TOM BAKER AKA THE PONDERING MAN I was a victim of violence... No reason for vileonce just few sucirity guards came... we were 3... t...
DEYTH BANGER Who are "THEY", you are one of "They" and they are the people/humans.
DEYTH BANGER We are waiting to see what is going to happen in Congress. We believe they will come up with somethi...
JUAN ROMERO The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it w...
EDMUND BURKE Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.
JOSS WHEDON I want everyone to wear what they want and mix it in their own way. That, to me, is what is modern.
KARL LAGERFELD They've grown up with the computer, so they expect things to be faster, including cooking. They like...
LYDIA BOTHAM They will explain what happened and what effect it had on the river. They are usually very good abou...
LARRY CARPENTER But this too is true: stories can save us.
TIM O'BRIEN And when they come to you, they say: We believe; and indeed they come in with unbelief and indeed th...
QURAN Each of us views life through a different lens. What we think is colored by the baggage we carry, an...
LAURIE BUCHANAN, PHD They get into the mind-set where they believe they can win every game. Tradition has a lot to do wit...
GREG AMUNDSON I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful tha...
ANDREW SOLOMON The results of my work don't have much to do with me. I can only be in charge of producing the work ...
ELIZABETH GILBERT Human beings are at their core defined by what they worship rather than primarily by what they think...
DALLAS WILLARD They were so ignorant, so naive, so resigned to their lot. They refused to believe anything that did...
PAULO COELHO If you have a big drop in the number of boats, that is going to be an effect, but specifically on th...
GUNNAR KNAPP The potential for this play is to sweep the audience into this world that they're not familiar with....
BRIAN PECCIA People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe, and then they do not take respons...
NEIL GAIMAN Millions of people acknowledge today that they do not know the meaning of life.
JAMES C. DOBSON There are people who do what they believe is right, but as they say, 'The road to hell is paved ...
AJA NAOMI KING This is what the path of Dharma is like. It's not that you have to do all the practices. It is suffi...
DHOMANG YANGTHANG People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. B...
HIPPOCRATES ..People don’t know how to be happy; they wouldn’t know what to do with their lives if they woke...
ALICE WALSH We will go there with an extremely open mind. If they are really serious . . . we should be able to ...
BERNARD ARNAULT 28. Feelings are neither right nor wrong. It's what you do with them that causes the problems.
JAMES C. DOBSON They want to finish the season. They want to finish it with heads held high and I believe they will....
BRIAN CLEMENS There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both ...
MORRIE SCHWARTZ The Academy is very specific about what they will award it for. I guess we had the right mix of prog...
MARCIE GOODMAN The results are history and they have a great franchise at Vienna. Whichever [partner] they go with ...
ANDREW LIGHT People don't believe what you tell them.
They rarely believe what you show them.
They ofte...
SETH GODIN They're a good team. They've got tradition behind them. They believe they can win, and I think the f...
EDDIE HOLEMAN Men are very goal-oriented. They believe in the hereafter. An orgasm is what they are here after.
ALAN ALTMAN Stand for something. Make your life mean something. Start where you are with what you have. You are ...
GERMANY KENT People may not always believe what you say, but they will believe what you do.
UNKNOWN People don't believe what you tell them.
They rarely believe what you show them.
They often ...
SETH GODIN They send an Allegheny County Child & Youth Services family worker to the house to see what is going...
DENNIS KIRK The thing that 'Glee' has successfully done that no other TV show has is that they're ju...
SAMUEL LARSEN Then forget Gabriel. Is there a particular reason you keep biting vampires?”
Will touched the...
CASSANDRA CLARE They know a lot, but they don’t know everything, and they can’t advise you on anything.
LUKASZ LANIECKI You prove to people that you don’t pay attention to their words when they see that you don’t rem...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR Men must be decided on what they will not do, and then they are able to act with vigor in what they ...
MENCIUS One of the characteristics of sects is that they judge all other believers to be lost. What they cla...
FLAVIL R. YEAKLEY JR. We're going to take what they're saying and just go with it. We believe that we're the best. They be...
FRED MATUA Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.
STANISLAW JERZY LEC Life isn't what is seems,the world isn't what it seems but then again the people aren't what they se...
K.L The Problem With Most People In Their Lives Is That They Focus On What They Don't Have And What Is H...
DR.'S RICK AND SUSANN CRAWFORD I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because t...
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. Professional humorists and cartoonists have to go through a stage in which they have to kill their o...
ROBERT MANKOFF The female folks believe in the world of sex,more than what you think they believe,but they prefer t...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN) Next generations will not know what is to have childhood.
DANIEL MELGAçO
More John Updike
When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of t...
JOHN UPDIKE My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Gree...
JOHN UPDIKE The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
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JOHN UPDIKE Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be ...
JOHN UPDIKE That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held...
JOHN UPDIKE When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of K...
JOHN UPDIKE My father was a scared man. And he communicated his anxiety to me, so that perhaps more than most wr...
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JOHN UPDIKE Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
JOHN UPDIKE Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once ...
JOHN UPDIKE Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.
JOHN UPDIKE I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
JOHN UPDIKE A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the peop...
JOHN UPDIKE There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless...
JOHN UPDIKE Lawrence had done it in a way, and Joyce. But I think it's an important thing to do now and then, to...
JOHN UPDIKE What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a wa...
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 Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another ...
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