John Updike Quotes
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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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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Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
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He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.
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Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
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He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.
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The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.
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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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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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coming away from the doctor's after a check-up Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.
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There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
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Nelson '...People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little.'
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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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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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...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?
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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.
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune' She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.
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'The past is the past,' Harry goes on, 'you got to live in the present. … It's the only way to think. When you're my age, you'll see it. At my age if you carried all the misery you've seen on your back you'd never get up in the morning.'
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Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, 'You ever been to Toledo?'
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Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.