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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.
John Updike -
Mr Shimada 'Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct.'
John Updike
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Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
John Updike -
A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?
John Updike -
Thelma '...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it.'
John Updike
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At last, small witches, goblins, hags,And pirates armed with paper bags,Their costumes hinged on safety pins,Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.
John Updike -
...he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.
John Updike -
You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI.
John Updike -
Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.
John Updike
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One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.
John Updike -
...'That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up.'
John Updike -
He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
John Updike -
'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.'
John Updike
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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.
John Updike -
Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.
John Updike -
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike -
'Driving is boring,' Rabbit pontificates, 'but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.'
John Updike