John Updike Quotes
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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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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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Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.
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Weeds don't know they're weeds.
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You don't know what you don't know.
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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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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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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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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 Harry '...I keep feeling hassled.'
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I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.
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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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Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.
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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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Like water, blood must run or grow scum.
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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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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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The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.
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There's more to being a human being than having your own way.