That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.


John Updike

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

But you have to begin taking it with 48 hours of the onset of symptoms. That's usually about when pe...
DR. MATTHEW CARTTER
You begin to take on the mentality of your coach. If he feels so confident, then I feel confident.
D'BRICKASHAW FERGUSON
You begin to feel the weight of all those spent, packed-away lives pressing in on you.
GILLIAN TINDALL
As you begin changing your thinking, start immediately to change your behaviour. Begin to act the pa...
JOHN MAXWELL
The fatal mistake is waiting for life's circumstances to be right before we begin. Simply begin with...
HUGH PRATHER
Feeling bad is not the problem.
The problem is that we feel bad about feeling bad.

O...
ERIC MICHA'EL LEVENTHAL
Once you begin to feel that nearness to God, the next thing is to begin to submit yourself to God at...
SUNDAY ADELAJA
I feel the better way is to 'begin' and then see where your imagination takes you. That's where the ...
DONALD MCKAY
John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike...
LAURA LIPPMAN
You can't end negotiations unless you begin them. And you can't begin them if you continuall...
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU
After six or seven performances of any song, you begin to perform it rather than feel it.
GRAHAM NASH
I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.
OLIVER SACKS
When you begin to fantasize about what you don't have, you begin to kill what you do have. #marriage
JAYCE O'NEAL
It doesn't matter what i think, how i feel, or where i see going. It only matter how you seem to tak...
IJIRASHIIJACK
You are as young as you feel. If you begin to feel the warmth of your soul, there will be a youthful...
JOHN O'DONOHUE
There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Begin where you are; work where you are; the hour which you are now wasting, dreaming of some far of...
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
That's something we have to feel out. It occurred to me to begin with, as a way of taking it a step ...
JOAN DIDION
Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but i feel more lonely in a crowded room with boring people...
HENRY ROLLINS
People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to fe...
MEG WOLITZER
If you don’t want to regret your life late, then begin to invest your time, begin to measure your ...
SUNDAY ADELAJA
Do you think I’ll ever get better at this? That my heart might someday stop trying to jump out of ...
STEPHENIE MEYER
When you get the card, it's a shock. People at age 50 don't feel ready to begin a new stage of life.
LOIS ARONSTEIN
I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villa...
DOROTHY ALLISON
At the fifth 'Good question!' they begin to feel it doesn't mean anything.
JAY CROTTS
If you do not begin to search, then you cannot find anything
SUNDAY ADELAJA
Through literacy you can begin to see the universe. Through music you can reach anybody. Between the...
GRACE SLICK
you weren't mine to begin with.
IAIN S. THOMAS
Kids feel like they have to puff up or shrink. These reclusive qualities begin to develop because yo...
MAHERSHALA ALI
When you can identify the insecurities inside the person that is hurting you then you can begin to h...
SHANNON L. ALDER
The reason I love the sea I cannot explain -- it's physical. When you dive you begin to feel like an...
JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU
Visualize this thing that you want, see it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blue print, and...
ROBERT COLLIER
It's a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you b...
GERMANY KENT
No tyrant need fear till men begin to feel confident in each other.
UNKNOWN
My message to you today is, to stay healthy, have a good meal, stay fit and begin working out becaus...
KRISTIN HAYNIE
If you quarell with your friend & then begin to reveal the innermost secrets you once shared togethe...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
People change their opinion according to your position. And both politicians and bureaucrats begin t...
RAJEEV SHUKLA
If you don’t want to regret your life later, then begin to invest your time, begin to measure your...
SUNDAY ADELAJA
People begin to feel more distant and disconnected, and often times, they begin to feel unsafe. We h...
HAL HEIDT
Humanity, you never had it to begin with.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
I care about you. More than I feel safe caring. You make my heart do some really weird things
KATIE KACVINSKY
You're about to become the thing you hate. Let the games begin.
NICHOLAS BELLA
Prayer is commission. Out of the quietness with God, power is generated that turns the spiritual mac...
E. STANLEY JONES
When you listen to other women's stories you begin to understand your own better and you begin t...
EVE ENSLER
As you recover, you will feel more conscious of your surroundings. Freed from the ‘fog’ of your ...
BEVERLY ENGEL
If you can feel the future, then you are about to experience it.
TOBA BETA
You aspire to great things? Begin with little ones.
AUGUSTINE SAINT
You aspire to great things? Begin with little ones.
SAINT AUGUSTINE
Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.
LEWIS CARROLL
Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
LEWIS CARROLL
why is it
that when the story ends
we begin to feel all of it
RUPI KAUR
The greatest thing about being in a band, and the strength of having companionship and collaboration...
KAREN FAIRCHILD
She was so caring. She just made you feel special.
KAREN PALMER
Congratulate yourself as a good beginner. Feel proud of God for choosing you to begin the work at ha...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
The counselor says that with more time and more surgeries, I will begin to feel normal again. She sa...
RASMENIA MASSOUD
You can't realize your dreams unless you have one to begin with.
THOMAS ALVA EDISON
You're appealing to the organization that found against you to begin with,
GEORGE INNES
Where do we begin this process of reevaluation of values? It makes sense to begin with our mind, whi...
ILCHI LEE
The trouble with worrying so much about your security in the future is that you feel so insecure in ...
HARLAN MILLER
Take time for yourself. If you feel guilty eating lunch away from your
desk or lingering in a b...
GINA GREENLEE
"Kindness can feel like a warm hug from a caring heart to a dear friend you care about miles apart."...
TOM BAKER AKA THE PONDERING MAN
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a t...
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
I’m not up for laughing, but their laughter makes the room feel safer, so we begin to explore.
JOHN GREEN
To reform a man, you must begin with his grandmother.
VICTOR HUGO
Now I begin to feel that all that is important comes in quietness and waiting; and that activity sho...
RODNEY COLLIN
High school is when a lot of kids begin to feel pressure to do drugs and start drinking.
HILARY PUTNAM
If you begin to find the alien by using common sense, then you have just narrowed your searching are...
TOBA BETA
I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also ...
E.L. KONIGSBURG
When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY
As soon as you begin to say We have always done things this way -- perhaps that might be a better wa...
HELEN M. CAM
Fame is what you have taken, character is what you give; when to this truth you waken then you begin...
BAYARD TAYLOR
Fame is what you have taken, character is what you give; when to this truth you waken then you begin...
BAYARD TAYLOR
Fame is what you have taken, character is what you give. When to this truth you awaken, then you beg...
BAYARD TAYLOR
Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilo...
JAMES EARL JONES
Your smile breaks my heart,
And your laughter burns my skin,
And if I had to tell you how ...
MARGO T. ROSE
If you want to accomplish the goals of your life, you have to begin with the spirit.
OPRAH WINFREY
When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial ...
WILFRED OWEN
Things begin to run together. You begin to wonder how you could ever get a purposeful line out of al...
BILL RANEY
After hearing two eyewitness accounts of the same accident, you begin to wonder about history.
UNKNOWN
With our new security packages and services, we hope that customers can begin to feel safer and more...
GAVIN PATTERSON
Begin at the beginning, the king said gravely, and go till you come to the end; then stop.
LEWIS CARROLL
People tell you to believe in yourself for your whole life, then call you arrogant when you begin ta...
CURTIS TYRONE JONES
[In] I Forgot That Love Existed, ... If my heart could do the thinking/ And my head begin to feel/ T...
VAN MORRISON
When you feel you have limited or no freedom… whether in business, personal or spiritual pursuits�...
KIM HA CAMPBELL
Long-time viewing of Internet violence tend to change a person's temperament, making the person pron...
YOU QUANXI
If positive and healthy materials are absent, negative materials are sure to be dominant in the cybe...
YOU QUANXI
In a robust global business environment, our business units operated well in the first quarter. More...
HARRY YOU
The Board of Directors and I are pleased to recognize Peter's outstanding contribution to the succes...
HARRY YOU
We are pleased to close the books on 2004 following the painstaking review of almost five years of f...
HARRY YOU
There is a secret a person with great knowledge discovers along the path to truth. That is, the more...
SUZY KASSEM
Strive to discover why you exist and then begin to invest your time into your purpose and calling.
SUNDAY ADELAJA
No one knows for sure about the future. But if you feel reluctant to plan something about it, then s...
TOBA BETA
No one knows for sure about the future. But if you feel reluctant to plan something about it, then s...
TOBA BETA
I didn't mean to give you the impression that life at the cathedral is like Barchester Towers as wri...
MADELEINE L'ENGLE
You have a tough crowd to please. If you arrive with something that doesn't piss anybody off, then y...
RICHARD MORTIMER
If you pump casually, you will pump forever. Pump hard to begin with and keep it up until you get th...
ZIG ZIGLAR
Of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all...
WILLIAM SAROYAN
After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading i...
ALICE HOFFMAN
When your looking for the love you thought you had for someone and it starts to become too difficult...
JASHON P
When we are doing that which makes our heart sing, we feel upbeat & energised about our lives. We be...
SAMANTHA FARRUGIA

More John Updike

When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of t...
JOHN UPDIKE
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Gree...
JOHN UPDIKE
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
JOHN UPDIKE
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek a...
JOHN UPDIKE
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be ...
JOHN UPDIKE
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held...
JOHN UPDIKE
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of K...
JOHN UPDIKE
My father was a scared man. And he communicated his anxiety to me, so that perhaps more than most wr...
JOHN UPDIKE
I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
JOHN UPDIKE
Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.
JOHN UPDIKE
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
JOHN UPDIKE
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the peop...
JOHN UPDIKE
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless...
JOHN UPDIKE
Lawrence had done it in a way, and Joyce. But I think it's an important thing to do now and then, to...
JOHN UPDIKE
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a wa...
JOHN UPDIKE
In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, w...
JOHN UPDIKE
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
JOHN UPDIKE
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a...
JOHN UPDIKE
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
JOHN UPDIKE
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the...
JOHN UPDIKE
Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.
JOHN UPDIKE
It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect l...
JOHN UPDIKE
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you, and industry can't take you.
JOHN UPDIKE
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we a...
JOHN UPDIKE
I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago,...
JOHN UPDIKE
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines...
JOHN UPDIKE
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
JOHN UPDIKE
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
JOHN UPDIKE
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
JOHN UPDIKE
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungratef...
JOHN UPDIKE
Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who ...
JOHN UPDIKE
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.
JOHN UPDIKE
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's p...
JOHN UPDIKE
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
JOHN UPDIKE
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do -- the...
JOHN UPDIKE
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual pos...
JOHN UPDIKE
The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic de...
JOHN UPDIKE
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.
JOHN UPDIKE
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we ar...
JOHN UPDIKE
Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that w...
JOHN UPDIKE
Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.
JOHN UPDIKE
Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When...
JOHN UPDIKE
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.
JOHN UPDIKE
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; a...
JOHN UPDIKE
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
JOHN UPDIKE
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinate...
JOHN UPDIKE
It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do...
JOHN UPDIKE
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watche...
JOHN UPDIKE
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, an...
JOHN UPDIKE
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged th...
JOHN UPDIKE
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
JOHN UPDIKE
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
JOHN UPDIKE
I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can,...
JOHN UPDIKE
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
JOHN UPDIKE
My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.
JOHN UPDIKE
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
JOHN UPDIKE
We are most alive when we're in love.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
JOHN UPDIKE
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky wa...
JOHN UPDIKE
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open se...
JOHN UPDIKE
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
JOHN UPDIKE
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
JOHN UPDIKE
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer c...
JOHN UPDIKE
The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.
JOHN UPDIKE
I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. Afte...
JOHN UPDIKE
All love comes from the family.
JOHN UPDIKE
Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoym...
JOHN UPDIKE
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull,...
JOHN UPDIKE
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
JOHN UPDIKE
America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is free...
JOHN UPDIKE
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumpe...
JOHN UPDIKE
I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is ...
JOHN UPDIKE
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
JOHN UPDIKE
The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and th...
JOHN UPDIKE
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is wh...
JOHN UPDIKE
It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.
JOHN UPDIKE
A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter p...
JOHN UPDIKE
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
JOHN UPDIKE
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvis...
JOHN UPDIKE
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungratef...
JOHN UPDIKE
By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and s...
JOHN UPDIKE
Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.
JOHN UPDIKE
All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.
JOHN UPDIKE
As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas br...
JOHN UPDIKE
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable...
JOHN UPDIKE
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview....
JOHN UPDIKE
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within th...
JOHN UPDIKE
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
JOHN UPDIKE
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
JOHN UPDIKE
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your s...
JOHN UPDIKE
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a...
JOHN UPDIKE
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the s...
JOHN UPDIKE
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by t...
JOHN UPDIKE
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy re...
JOHN UPDIKE
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
JOHN UPDIKE
Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.
JOHN UPDIKE
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no s...
JOHN UPDIKE
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolifi...
JOHN UPDIKE
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell ...
JOHN UPDIKE
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied...
JOHN UPDIKE
I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of ...
JOHN UPDIKE
I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I did...
JOHN UPDIKE
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip nove...
JOHN UPDIKE
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what d...
JOHN UPDIKE
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.
JOHN UPDIKE
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
JOHN UPDIKE
We are most alive when we're in love.
JOHN UPDIKE
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
JOHN UPDIKE
Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
JOHN UPDIKE
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
JOHN UPDIKE
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having rea...
JOHN UPDIKE
The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty...
JOHN UPDIKE
You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it ...
JOHN UPDIKE
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get fo...
JOHN UPDIKE
Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.
JOHN UPDIKE
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the n...
JOHN UPDIKE
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plu...
JOHN UPDIKE
He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous sy...
JOHN UPDIKE
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they ...
JOHN UPDIKE
The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.
JOHN UPDIKE
Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.
JOHN UPDIKE
A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its descripti...
JOHN UPDIKE
In his field - where edge, zip and instant impact are sine qua non - Kidd is second to none.
JOHN UPDIKE
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
JOHN UPDIKE
He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a b...
JOHN UPDIKE
Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other
JOHN UPDIKE
In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-b...
JOHN UPDIKE
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are s...
JOHN UPDIKE
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which th...
JOHN UPDIKE
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; a...
JOHN UPDIKE
What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
JOHN UPDIKE
The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'Th...
JOHN UPDIKE
Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigora...
JOHN UPDIKE
I have never liked haircuts.
JOHN UPDIKE
New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively mainta...
JOHN UPDIKE
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the en...
JOHN UPDIKE
Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-cen...
JOHN UPDIKE
I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his wor...
JOHN UPDIKE
Doctorow here appears not so much a re-constructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until...
JOHN UPDIKE
Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to stee...
JOHN UPDIKE
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longe...
JOHN UPDIKE
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
JOHN UPDIKE
I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having rea...
JOHN UPDIKE
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it al...
JOHN UPDIKE
All sunshine without a little rain makes a desert.
JOHN UPDIKE
"Upon shaving off one's beard." The scissors cut the long-grown hair; the razor scrapes the remnant ...
JOHN UPDIKE
A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or...
JOHN UPDIKE
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism
JOHN UPDIKE
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
JOHN UPDIKE
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is ...
JOHN UPDIKE
On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly pu...
JOHN UPDIKE
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
JOHN UPDIKE
I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights...
JOHN UPDIKE
Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flour...
JOHN UPDIKE
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to ou...
JOHN UPDIKE
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watche...
JOHN UPDIKE
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
JOHN UPDIKE
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying
JOHN UPDIKE
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So t...
JOHN UPDIKE
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating noti...
JOHN UPDIKE
An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they ...
JOHN UPDIKE
His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes...
JOHN UPDIKE
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and...
JOHN UPDIKE
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, becaus...
JOHN UPDIKE
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just start...
JOHN UPDIKE
A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of r...
JOHN UPDIKE
Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main mater...
JOHN UPDIKE
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a super...
JOHN UPDIKE
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more...
JOHN UPDIKE
Ich habe in diesen Tagen viel über Liebe nachgedacht, und darüber, wie ich das Wort hasste und es ...
JOHN UPDIKE
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a sta...
JOHN UPDIKE
We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted h...
JOHN UPDIKE
Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family t...
JOHN UPDIKE
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating ...
JOHN UPDIKE
In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a d...
JOHN UPDIKE
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
JOHN UPDIKE
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of ru...
JOHN UPDIKE
There's something very reassuring... about the written record.
JOHN UPDIKE
…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like li...
JOHN UPDIKE
I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over...
JOHN UPDIKE
If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extincti...
JOHN UPDIKE
For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic ...
JOHN UPDIKE
I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside o...
JOHN UPDIKE
John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.
JOHN UPDIKE
My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and uns...
JOHN UPDIKE
He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red f...
JOHN UPDIKE
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
JOHN UPDIKE
I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true.
JOHN UPDIKE