John Updike Quotes
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'Well,' his father says, 'I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it.'
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...a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.
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God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.
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Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.
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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
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I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
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It rots a writer’s brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.
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Pru, to Harry She tells him, 'You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you.'
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If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.
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Pru '...He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal.'
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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian.
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Mr Shimada 'Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct.'
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Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
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Charlie interrupts impatiently, 'Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill.'
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From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.
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Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle 'She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend.'
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...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?
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One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
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We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.