John Updike Quotes
Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle, aged 39 'This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem...'
Quotes to Explore
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Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.
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In Australia, kids play in American accents.
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No matter what message you are about to deliver somewhere, whether it is holding out a hand of friendship, or making clear that you disapprove of something, is the fact that the person sitting across the table is a human being, so the goal is to always establish common ground.
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I like boxes because of the secrets they hide.
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It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members.
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I do yoga, I do Bikram and I run, and I eat really healthy.
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We were making new ones the second year. We were in syndication the second year. So we were on Saturday nights, prime time, every morning, and then they put it on Sunday evenings too. So it was all over the place.
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Just because scientists have the knowledge to do it, the technology to do it, and some may even have a financial motive or other incentive to do it, does not make it right.
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Whoever is for higher taxes, feel free to pay higher taxes.
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Cancer is like a cockroach. It just comes back stronger. I'm tearing apart the immune system of the cockroach and seeing how it ticks. I've opened up my own pathology center.
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A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
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I met a number of young, striving, enterprising people in cities like Aligarh and Hubli. But the mental landscape of these towns is out of sync with their reality. Many of these towns are hellholes.
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And I have been able to establish this sort of decent reputation as being a decent character actor.
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Why do you bother asking, when you know the answer and you also know that you don't intend to believe it?
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Myth. Rape is a manifestation of male political and economic power. Fact. Any given black man is three times as likely to be reported a rapist as a white man. Do blacks suddenly have more political and economic power? Maybe rape does not derive from power, but rather from powerlessness.
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'Salam aleikum.'
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Stolen sweets are always sweeter,Stolen kisses much completer,Stolen looks are nice in chapels,Stolen, stolen, be your apples.
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Fuck Radio Ethiopia man, I'm Radio Brooklyn!
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Instead, we try to apply Aesop's 2,600-year-old equation to opportunities in which we have reasonable confidence as to how many birds are in the bush and when they will emerge (a formulation that my grandsons would probably update to 'A girl in a convertible is worth five in the phonebook.').
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The only leader America should ever have is someone who understands that the people are the government.
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It's easy to remember only the good parts of people if you never see them. Real people are much more complicated.
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There was no room in him for curiosity; The capacity for observation had long since starved on the aridness of his soul.
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Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle, aged 39 'This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem...'
