John Updike Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I am of the opinion that the appreciation and the desire for what is good takes more study and insight than does the understanding and test for the best music and art.
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I like films to be complete in their written form.
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I'd like to scale back the television. I'm constantly told that I'm over-exposed, and I don't want to end up like Carol Vorderman.
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Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
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I think talent makes me really attracted to someone more than anything.
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Good cinema is what we can believe, and bad cinema is what we can't believe.
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Acting is in your soul.
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What really makes it fun for an actor is when the script is good.
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I doubt there's any government in the world that guides itself primarily by strategy or conceptual documents or worldview. Anybody who has the reins of power has to look at practical limitations and tradeoffs - the fact that you can focus at most on one or two things at a time, that resources are limited.
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Sometimes, I find that just the simplest, cleanest things that are intelligently performed are funniest to me.
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The only ones who like Milton Berle are his mother - and the public.
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It's a touchy subject, but as a Southerner, you can't ignore our history any more than a Renaissance painter can ignore the Virgin Mary. And it's impossible to drive down a road or eat a vegetable or pass a church without being reminded of slavery.
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It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.
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You can't get there alone. People have to help you, and I do believe in karma. I believe in paybacks. You get people to help you by telling the truth, by being earnest.
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Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul? Man is a great depth, O Lord. The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart.
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Whenever you do an animated project or a voice-over project it's inevitable that part of your personality comes into play.
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Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
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The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.
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'One should always be skeptical. That’s always been our problem. We have too many believers.''Believers in what?''In everything.'
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I used to desire many, many things, but now I have just one desire, and that's to get rid of all my other desires.
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The limit is not as narrow as it might be. I do not claim for this action, as it now goes on, an ideal degree of efficiency. What I do claim is that this type of competition already reveals its nature and its ultimate power to hold seeming monopolies in check.
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We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more.
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As Isabel acted out her date, both of them laughing, I stayed in the kitchen, out of sight, and pretended she was telling me, too. And that, for once, I was part of this hidden language of laughter and silliness and girls that was, somehow, friendship.
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Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.