To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
Related
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungratef...
JOHN UPDIKE John Kerry has what it takes ... to be president of the United States,
JOHN EDWARDS John Kerry has what it takes right here to be president of the United States, ... I, for one, intend...
JOHN EDWARDS Both referred to the Affordable Care Act, which is the accurate title of the health care reform law,...
DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be Vice President of the United State...
JOE BIDEN President Bush has nominated John Roberts the man, and America has got to know John Roberts the man,...
MIKE DEWINE We further decree that the Senate of the United States elect a prominent Democrat as their presiding...
JOSHUA A. NORTON Nothing is ever as good or as bad as it appears to be.
JEFFREY FRY Priority is priority. I don't care who you are. The president of the United States, he's going to ha...
HARRY TAYLOR Without fair notice of what these charges are, we will have no fair chance of representing our clien...
GREG CRAIG It is terrible-and I mean terrible-nuisance to be kin to the president of the United States.
HARRY S TRUMAN This election is about who's going to be the next President of the United States!
DAN QUAYLE The president of the United States can't be expected to be an intelligence analyst and a case office...
BOB GRAHAM A librarian for president is exactly what this country needs.
RICHARD CASTLE John Edwards has never really stopped running for president of the United States. While hopefully so...
BILL PEASLEE If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
JOHN UPDIKE If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he mus...
JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY You tax Mexico? The president of the United States is going to tax Mexico to get a wall for the Unit...
DANA PERINO As always, we are thrilled and excited to have with us the vice president of the United States ... w...
RUSH LIMBAUGH To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their mos...
DAVID MCCULLOUGH If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he mus...
JOHN F. KENNEDY I am Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States of America.
AL GORE One of the very best reasons I can think of to vote for me as president is to have Laura Bush as fir...
GEORGE W. BUSH I believe Donald Trump is a bona fide authoritarian. I am deeply concerned that if he were president...
EVAN MCMULLIN We need someone who has the experience - and the demeanor - to be the president of the United States...
ROBERT J. BENTLEY You can go in there with the idea that you're going to be an aggressive and effective advocate of th...
BRIT HUME It's a delicate balancing act. I am sure that Stephen Harper wants good relations with President Bus...
JAMES BLANCHARD Donald Trump just happens to be one of those who endorsed me I do not want to see as president of th...
MITT ROMNEY President Abraham Lincoln never lost his ardor for the United States to remain united during the Civ...
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY When Richard M. Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th president of the United States, the Watergat...
RICHARD BEN-VENISTE For most governors, we find the United States Senate or the United States Congress very frustrating ...
DAVE HEINEMAN In the name of the United States and President Bush, I want to thank the Mexican people, President F...
TONY GARZA I don't want to be disrespectful of the president of the United States, but as a political perso...
ED GILLESPIE The idea the president of the United States was warned that Al-Qaeda was going to attack the United ...
CONDOLEEZZA RICE B.S.. I could have been the president of the United States, and she was going to be rude to me.
JOE VERONESE As required by the Ethics and Government Act, and with the authorization of the court supervising in...
CHARLES BAKALY I may be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned business.
CHESTER ARTHUR I may be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned business.
CHESTER A. ARTHUR I think it's important for the president of the United States to be aware of the intelligence in...
JOHN MCCAIN John Wayne was one of the greatest ambassadors for the United States that ever lived.
MAUREEN O'HARA Black people have been qualified to be president for hundreds of years. George Washington Carver cou...
CHRIS ROCK The best reason I can think of for not running for President of the United States is that you have t...
DR. STRANGELOVE The best reason I can think of for not running for President of the United States is that you have t...
ADLAI E. STEVENSON JR. going to be able to lobby (President Clinton) in a way that no other person could possibly lobby the...
GERALDINE FERRARO I'm the president of the United States. I'm not the emperor of the United States.
BARACK OBAMA Nothing in this overkill of an investigation amounts to a justification for the impeachment of the p...
DAVID KENDALL I admire President Chavez for his strength to resist the United States. Instead, Bush is waging a wa...
CINDY SHEEHAN The President of the United States thinks that for the Japanese opium is more dangerous than war.
TOWNSEND HARRIS ...Resolved, that William Jefferson Clinton, president of the United States ... in violation of his ...
HENRY HYDE It's hard for me to listen to President Bush invoking my father's memory to attack John Kerry. Senat...
CAROLINE SCHLOSSBERG It's hard for me to listen to President Bush invoking my father's memory to attack John Kerry. Senat...
CAROLINE KENNEDY SCHLOSSBERG She's as good as I've ever seen, as far as presidential material. President of the United States. Th...
DONNA LOPIANO John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike...
LAURA LIPPMAN To the president of the United States, I simply say that God cannot be pleased with our response,
ELIJAH CUMMINGS Really, of all the important mission responsibilities assigned to United States Strategic Command by...
C. ROBERT KEHLER When we win the nomination, we'll be president of all 50 of the United States.
HOWARD OPINSKY I didn't mean to give you the impression that life at the cathedral is like Barchester Towers as wri...
MADELEINE L'ENGLE I don't think the president of the United States is going to allow this school district to take a hi...
LARRY MARSHALL I'm President of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any
more broccoli!
GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH Kindness is universal. Sometimes being kind allows others to see the goodness in humanity through yo...
GERMANY KENT If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he mus...
JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY After 9/11, the President of the United States was a challenged leader. He faced difficult times. We...
JEFF SESSIONS Under the leadership of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the United States has given up the...
MARTY MEEHAN I'm from North Carolina, and I stand here humbled, honored, and proud to place in nomination for...
HARVEY GANTT The president of the United States did not tamper with a witness,
CHARLES RUFF If a president of the United States ever lied to the American People, he should resign.
BILL CLINTON I may be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned business.
CHESTER A. ARTHUR One cannot always be sure of the truth of what one hears if he happens to be President of the United...
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT As a nuclear power - as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon - the United States has...
BARACK OBAMA Donald Trump is a good man, and he will make a great president of the United States of America.
MIKE PENCE The Dream Act . . . will allow them to go to college in all 50 states. The students have to live in ...
DANIEL OSORIO The chair and longtime friend of Dick Cheney is proud to declare Dick Cheney the Republican nominee ...
TRENT LOTT When Donald Trump becomes president of the United States of America, the change will be... huge.
MIKE PENCE To love is to act.
VICTOR HUGO But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.
BOB DYLAN The Voting Rights Act was, and still is, vitally important to the future of democracy in the United ...
CORETTA SCOTT KING a vicious act of terror, which the United States strongly condemns.
CONDOLEEZZA RICE The President will plan to be part of whatever observances are held upon the return of the bodies to...
PJ CROWLEY John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another for...
M. H. ABRAMS The United States government continues to turn a blind eye to mounting evidence of widespread abuse ...
ANTHONY ROMERO I hereby resign this office of president of the United States.
RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON I hereby resign this office of president of the United States.
RICHARD M. NIXON I know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, n...
AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS Even if you're the President of the United States, you still act like a little child and think l...
STELLAN SKARSGARD Today I am announcing my support for Senator Barack Obama for President of the United States of Amer...
JOE ANDREW I spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think ...
JOHN MCCAIN This is a special moment for Marilyn (his wife), for me and for my family, ... Today, I officially a...
DAN QUAYLE I'm used to people not paying me a whole lot of attention and underestimating me and, frankly, f...
CAROL MOSELEY BRAUN I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative ...
BARACK OBAMA as close to a betrayal of the interests of the United States as I've ever witnessed in the United St...
ROBERT TORRICELLI A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung...
PETER WESSEL ZAPFFE Women are being considered as candidates for Vice President of the United States because it is the w...
NORA EPHRON We are going to keep doing it until the equity of it appeals to a president of the United States.
JAMES BROSNAHAN I announce that my government is going to take legal action in the United States. To call for the as...
HUGO CHAVEZ Together with the president of the United States let us be able to bring peace and security to our p...
EHUD BARAK The gaming industry is notoriously paranoid. It was easier for me to be wearing a gun within an arm'...
DAVID ALMEIDA Be the girl you want your daughter to be. Be the girl you want your son to date. Be classy, be smart...
GERMANY KENT Be kind. We never know what people are going through. Give grace and mercy because one day your circ...
GERMANY KENT I think what we saw in John Kerry last night was a strength of conviction, a vision that we want to ...
JOHN EDWARDS There is a sense in which the United States ambassador speaks to the United States, as well as for t...
ANDREW YOUNG
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 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 Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It's not that you get better ideas, the old ones just g...
JOHN UPDIKE