John Updike Quotes
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Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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Harry, to Thelma, about Janet 'She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it.'
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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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Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.
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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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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...'
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I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.
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You don't know what you don't know.
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
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Nelson, to Annabelle 'The misery of the world,' he says, reaching into himself to overcome her resistance. 'That's what I kept thinking during my group this morning – the pity of everything, all of us, these confused souls trying so pathetically hard to break out of the fog – to see through our compulsions, our needs as they chew us up...'
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Weeds don't know they're weeds.
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There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
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'...Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere.'
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'Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the opposite. It's got me into a lot of trouble, but I've had a lot of fun.'
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Like water, blood must run or grow scum.
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Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.
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Nelson, to Harry '...I keep feeling hassled.'
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The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
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The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
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This airport has been designed with big windows viewing the runways, so if there's a crash everybody can feast upon it with their own eyes. The fireball, the fuselage doing a slow skidding twirl, shedding its wings.
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The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.