FastSaying

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.


John Updike

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The problem with inner child is that if it keeps showing too often, people label you as childish.
SHON MEHTA It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Joh...
CAROL WINDLEY People will look up and as long as the sun and moon are above their heads they won't know that the w...
ANDONI GARCIA John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike...
LAURA LIPPMAN I had read once that dumb people didn't know they were dumb. They thought they were just as smart as...
DINAH KATT When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being a...
NEIL GAIMAN You’ll never get a new ending if you keep starting with the same tired beginning.
LISA DAILY . . . a woman . . . told us she was forever getting herself into trouble. "But I just keep coming ba...
BETTY FORD It's mental, getting used to the tempo. It keeps getting faster. I just try to keep up.
DIO DANTE I didn't mean to give you the impression that life at the cathedral is like Barchester Towers as wri...
MADELEINE L'ENGLE The New England conscience doesn't keep you from doing what you shouldn't -- it just keeps you from ...
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER The New England conscience doesn't keep you from doing what you shouldn't-it just keeps you from enj...
CLEVELAND AMORY The New England conscience doesn't keep you from doing what you shouldn't - it just keeps you from e...
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER I got to thinking, if I can raise $20,000 a year, it will keep people from moving out and ending up ...
KAREN PERRY To keep art stimulating, it's important to open it up to new horizons, which includes showing it...
HANS-ULRICH OBRIST Everybody started saying, well, this cat's not as dumb as people think he is.
DAVID ALLAN COE If you don’t like the ending, you make up a new one.
SARAH ADDISON ALLEN Only after the last tree has been cut down,only after the last river has been poisoned,only after th...
THE CREE PEOPLE Maybe these kids are just too young and too dumb to know about the first 13. Maybe they can't co...
TIM HUDSON Sad to think that we won't have any new stories from John Updike, one of the last century's ...
ALAN CHEUSE Everybody started saying, well, this cat's not as dumb as people think he is.
DAVID ALLAN COE It's always easiest for me as a writer if I know I have a great ending. It can make everything e...
DAVID BENIOFF i know im not the girl you wanted. not the one you want to hear from. but what you see is what you g...
SIMI GREWAL But as long as something is never even started, you never have to worry about it ending. It has endl...
SARAH DESSEN She was kind of crying, too, because she liked happy endings. Then she realized it wasn't an ending ...
SUSAN ELIZABETH PHILLIPS The too LESS is too MUCH if you know how to make it too MUCH; the too MUCH is too LESS if you don’...
KAGABO BURANGA JACQUES If you don't learn constantly, you don't grow, and you will wither. Too many people wither o...
IRIS APFEL The New England conscience doesn't keep you from doing what you shouldn't - it just keeps yo...
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER Maybe we're just too dumb to know we shouldn't be doing this. And we really don't care.
DAN BUENNING Every time you get into a new job, new location, you have an amazing opportunity in front of you. Yo...
GARY COHN You know, I don't think my music is important, I don't think it's changing the world, I ...
SUFJAN STEVENS if we keep showing people religion, Jesus will never be found
MOALE FONO This is too much reality for a Friday.
AS GOOD AS IT GETS John Henry and I just started paddling as fast as we could towards her,
DAVID BRYANT The development process is never ending and fast-paced. You have to do a level of work just to keep ...
CHRIS WRIGHT The girls worked at it and they stayed in the game, even with facing a huge deficit. They never gave...
DAVE HYLAND I'd had years of practise looking dumb when people threw out Greek names I didn't know. It's a skill...
RICK RIORDAN I was too dumb to know Opie was going to grow up to be a great Director, if so, boy, I would certain...
GEORGE LINDSEY I just want everybody to know my music and get to know my squad, Remy Boyz; just to show people New ...
FETTY WAP John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another for...
M. H. ABRAMS People always say that Glasgow has had umpteen social problems but keeps finding ways of getting ove...
EDWIN MORGAN The market has run up too far, too fast. But it's been showing resilience (to profit-taking). Sellin...
YOSHIHISA OKAMOTO The market has run up too far, too fast. But it's been showing resilience (to profit-taking). Sellin...
YOSHIHISA OKAMOTO I told the jury if they couldn't show mercy for John Moxley, then they could show mercy for themselv...
GREG DENUE For many people, the Oscar can be the kiss of death, but Jamie is showing that he has staying power ...
JAWN MURRAY It's just an experiment, but if it keeps up this way, we may get a couple more.
BOB CRANE You just have to keep driving down the road. It's going to bend and curve and you'll speed up and sl...
ELLEN DEGENERES You just have to keep driving down the road. It’s going to bend and curve and you’ll speed up an...
ELLEN DEGENERES I'm so proud to think that 25 years after Terry started this marathon, people are showing up and sti...
BETTY FOX I thought lightning wasn't supposed to strike in the same place twice....sure it does...but only if ...
JODI PICOULT Yeah, we started fouling early, but we had to give too many fouls before they got to the free throw ...
RUSSELL PERKINS I know it's early days yet as far as the spring is concerned but he's showing as much as any of the ...
GREG CHILDS You can't change where you come from, but you can change where you go from here. Just like a book. I...
SARAH ADDISON ALLEN You see, you all start with the premise that democracy is some good. I don't think it's worth a damn...
DEAN ACHESON Congratulations, to the people which made gotham series, still need some more and extra work!
DEYTH BANGER It's essential to keep moving, learning and evolving for as long as you're here and this world keeps...
RASHEED OGUNLARU When you're fat like me, you get hungry. ... I'm still hungry. I hadn't eaten since noon. I'm still ...
TONY STEWART I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how ma...
PETER CAREY You know, I started my career in politics in 1967. I'm not new to this. I did not just fall off ...
DENNIS KUCINICH If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
JOHN UPDIKE It's going to be crazy, I know that. I know there's going to be so much pressure, but I've got to ke...
ASHLEY HOBBS Instead of breaking that bridge, we should, if possible, provide another, that he may retire the so...
ARISTIDES ("THE JUST") We make war that we may live in peace.
ARISTIDES ("THE JUST") When writing, I uncage KAT: Keep Adding Tension. Even if I don't know where the story's going, petti...
DON ROFF One reason why upturns follow downturns is that downturns tend to overshoot. People get panicky, the...
EDMUND PHELPS To stay on the map you've got to keep showing up.
PETER GALLAGHER Keep out of this," Lucian said. "I'm not smiting anybody."

"You're showing mercy." Catch-...
LLOYD ALEXANDER Everything's just so awful, ... I don't know why God even invented the world if he was just going to...
ANANDA We're not tethered to a fence, we're just too dumb to untie the knot
MARK LAMBERT You know, a heart can be broken, but it keeps on beating, just the same.
FANNIE FLAGG The only tactic liberals have is to try to intimidate people into thinking that the Tea Party is rac...
HERMAN CAIN Feast of John Coleridge Patteson, First Bishop of Melanesia, & his Companions, Martyrs, 1871 The ...
BP. THOMAS WILSON I believe that pain keeps us pure, and sadness keeps us human. Sometimes the pain that you feel feel...
TOMMY POLO I once started out
to walk around the world
but ended up in Brooklyn,
that Bridge was...
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI Every coach, every executive, every leader: They all know right from wrong. Even those Enron guys. W...
BO SCHEMBECHLER It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry -- if they want to be successful, the...
JONAH LEHRER He'd say, ‘You know what your problem is? You just get bored. We're up and it's just too boring to...
BRETT FAVRE I was so happy that it filmed in New York not only because it's an amazing city, but also because a ...
ALICIA WITT Facebook keeps asking whats on my mind, i just keep posting : you wouldnt wanna know dat
OLASOT I was so happy that it filmed in New York not only because it's an amazing city, but also becaus...
ALICIA WITT People started showing up. When I say that all that music sounded sterile to us, I think our first r...
CRAIG FINN But as we all know, rock ‘n’ roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, ...
THOMAS PYNCHON The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as bei...
KURT VONNEGUT If you were to ask me what is one of the things that keeps me up at night, it is how to stay relevan...
CARYN LERNER To suggest, however, that Pocahontas worshipped the white man, abandoned her people, or loved John S...
CAMILLA TOWNSEND I didn't hit it too well in the first few holes, when there was no wind. But I got it up and down a ...
ARJUN ATWAL Using lots of fresh foods, fruits and vegetables, helps to keep the menu buoyant - I don't know ...
SALLY SCHNEIDER You know, a heart can be broken, but it still keeps a-beating just the same.
FANNIE FLAGG Austin always had that dumb old hat on. I always wished he'd get a new one, but he kept the old one....
LEAH CHASE I just tell these guys where to be and at what time and what day and they're always there. As long a...
DON LIPPI What's the difference between people who see and seek gaps and those that see and seek bridges? The ...
RICHIE NORTON If I find John D. Rockefeller's wallet and keep it because I know he doesn't need it, it will still ...
COLBY KAVANAGH I just would like to keep the image the same as how I first started here.
BARBARAH RODRIGUEZ Democracy's fatal flaw: There are more dumb people than smart people. Welcome to the new Dark Ages!
OLIVER GASPIRTZ If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT We rehearsed in the same place as Curt, so we saw him all the time and everything, but he wasn't in ...
JONATHAN RICHMAN I'm from Hollywood; I'm too dumb to be nervous about New York.
YVONNE DE CARLO Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters.
JEFFREY FRY If you make decent pitches to him, you give him respect because you know he'll swing at anything. Yo...
JAMIE MOYER

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.
JOHN UPDIKE An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek a...
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...
JOHN UPDIKE I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. ...
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 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