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Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.


John Updike

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NICHOLAS SPARKS In life, it is not a case of what you want but more like what you would like in a case of any decisi...
GARY F EVANS... If you want to be successful, it's just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doin...
WILL ROGERS Doing what you want to do is easy. Doing what you have to do is hard.
LARRY ELDER Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk abou...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Others think it's a choice between doing what we want to do and being happy, and doing what God want...
PAUL LITTLE We want to provide a link between the classroom environment and what you are doing outside of the cl...
RICHARD CLARK Success follows doing what you want to do. There is no other way to be successful.
MALCOLM STEVENSON FORBES Success follows doing what you want to do. There is no other way to be successful.
MALCOLM S. FORBES The goal really is to keep playing. We want everyone to hear us. We do it for ourselves, and this is...
JAMES ROTH I'm getting married because I'm in love with a girl and want to spend my life with her. You can't li...
DAN MARINO Other people will call me a rebel, but I just feel like I'm living my life and doing what I want...
JOAN JETT Freedom is not in doing what you want to do, but in becoming what you want to be.
ARDIS WHITMAN You'll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that.
ROALD DAHL If you're a good journalist, what you do is live a lot of things vicariously, and report them fo...
HARRY REASONER We want to thank you personally for what you're doing for people.
JAMES SAPPIER Wanting something badly even though it could hurt you," Bentley repeated. He looked up at the ceilin...
NELLIE CHRISTINE It's good to know what other people are doing, but what is most important is knowing and realizing w...
RODEL NATIVIDAD CASIO I spent a lot of time doing things other people wanted me to do, so I'm doing what I want to do ...
KARL MALONE Are you doing what you're doing today because you want to do it, or because it's what you were doing...
DR. PHIL To me, flying free is doing what I want to do, even if it's different from what everybody expects me...
CRYSTAL WATERS If you want to be loved, do what others want. If you want to live, do what you want. The choice is y...
MAHRUKH Be careful not to compromise what you want most for what you want now.
ZIG ZIGLAR To get what you want, STOP doing what isn't working.
DENNIS WEAVER For years I played the what-if game. Maybe you're acquainted with this pastime. The rules are simple...
CRAIG GROESCHEL I'm like, 'What world am I living in?' Aren't movies made to have something to say? Why make a movie...
JAKE GYLLENHAAL We are where we want to be and doing what we want to be doing.
CASSY MOON If you can make a living doing what you love, that is a blessing.
DAVID A. R. WHITE Success is doing what you want to do, when you want, where you want, with whom you want, as much as ...
ANTHONY ROBBINS Success is doing what you want to do, when you want, where you want, with whom you want, as much as ...
ANTHONY ROBBINS Sometimes it's just harder to remind yourself about what you're doing and why you're doing it, ... O...
ANDRE AGASSI Do what you love doing.
JULIANNA MARGULIES Success is not about making more money all the time. It is about living your life daily doing what y...
LORRIN L. LEE John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike...
LAURA LIPPMAN Ask yourself if what you are doing today is getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow.
UNKNOWN I'm doing exactly what I want to do, and I'm having fun doing it.
DAVID JOHANSEN Sometimes you dont even want to think aout what people are doing with their groceries.
SARAH DESSEN You have 30 other people who like doing what you like doing.
MARK STEMEN If you want to know your future, look at what you are doing in this moment.
TIBETAN PROVERB To get what you want, STOP doing what isn't working.
EARL WARREN I'm getting married because I'm in love with a girl and want to spend my life with her. You ...
DAN MARINO Freedom begins way back. It begins not with doing what you want but with doing what you ought - that...
ELISABETH ELLIOT If you are doing what everyone else is doing, you are doing something wrong. Why? Because most peopl...
ANDY ANDREWS When will we realise what we are doing??
DEYTH BANGER The most daring thing is to be yourself and to do exactly what you want to do at that point in time ...
WIZ KHALIFA I'm not one to be like, 'What is everybody doing? Let me do that!' I just do what I want...
BEBE REXHA People resist change; if they like something, then they want you to keep doing it over and over - bu...
CONOR OBERST The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception...
SAM HARRIS If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from...
ROBERT FRITZ If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from wh...
ROBERT FRITZ I'm doing what I want to do, and I don't care what you think you need!
WESLEY WILLIS People respond to tragedies like this in different ways. Everybody is doing their own thing. If they...
JOEY DIFATTA Each of us views life through a different lens. What we think is colored by the baggage we carry, an...
LAURIE BUCHANAN, PHD Character is doing what you don't want to do but know you should do.
JOYCE MEYER You can do what you want. But I can also do what I want. And what I’ll be doing is telling everyon...
JUSTIN HALPERN Sometimes it's just harder to remind yourself about what you're doing and why you're doi...
ANDRE AGASSI If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from wh...
ROBERT FRITZ I want you to believe in yourself, and take chances, even if it is scary and even if you don't know ...
OSCAR AULIQ-ICE It would show hugely if I didn't want to be somewhere. Doing what you want to do can only generate g...
AMANDA BURTON Our goal is to tell people about the International Space Station. I think very rarely people look up...
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN If you act like you know what you're doing, you can do anything you want -- except neurosurgery.
JOHN LOWENSTEIN If you act like you know what you're doing, you can do anything you want-except neurosurgery.
SHARON STONE ...I've learned that doing what you think is right doesn't always make you feel good. For another, I...
ANN RINALDI Discipline is choosing between what you want NOW and what you want MOST.
UNKNOWN If you really want to cover the story, if you believe in what you're doing, you have absolutely no c...
LARA LOGAN If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from wh...
JACK CANFIELD "Since we don't always get we want, the growth is in making what we get, what we want." - Simcha Glu...
SIMCHA GLUCK Yes, there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They a...
EDWARD ABBEY You don't build your character by doing what everybody else is doing.
CARLOS GHOSN We don't feed into what everybody is saying. We just want to show everybody we're a good basketball ...
ANTONIO ANDERSON If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, b...
THOMAS MERTON A lot of people want to make films and do photography and things, but I'm quite happy doing what...
SYD BARRETT Life is what you make of it.
You have to decide what you want in life.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA Ques eso? Queso?
NOLAN J. VANDER HAAGEN You see, the what ifs are as boundless as the stars.
SALLY GARDNER Compromise is what binds people together. Compromise is sharing and conciliatory, it is loving and k...
ALI HARRIS If you find what you do each day seems to have no link to any higher purpose, you probably want to r...
RONALD A. HEIFETZ In manufacturing, too much work is beyond repetitive - it is inhumane. The people doing this work ar...
STEVE JURVETSON Success in life is being, doing, and having what you want in your own way.
LORRIN L. LEE If sex is as simple as: trying something (be it a position, technique or otherwise); seeing if you l...
MARTHA LEE In movies, what they're doing is trying not to hit each other. Here, you want to make your blade mov...
JAY GLENN Happiness is usually experienced when you have learned something new, doing what you really want to ...
LORRIN L. LEE Getting involved with the environmental groups has been great for our business. When people hear wha...
CRAIG MATHEWS We don't have any objection to what they're doing for City Center, and we understand that people wan...
MARILYN ANDERSON You accomplish what you want to accomplish. I just don't ever want to hurt anybody doing it.
YANNI How do you love your children?
By doing what's best for them.
Then how would you love your...
J. GRANT HOWARD If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when yo...
DAN MILLMAN You talk about it and people want it. People want to feel secure and feel everybody is in the tent a...
DAVID LANDAU It was a lot of fun, ... We were doing what all cops want to do. Everybody was out there trying to m...
JEFF SANDERS Doing nothing will get you nothing or a lot of what you don't want...
DR.'S RICK AND SUSANN CRAWFORD Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Gi...
GILLIAN FLYNN The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between y...
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between y...
ANNE LINDBERGH Each bowl has its own unique appeal and own unique way of doing gifts. That is what makes bowl gifts...
GREG BLACKWELL The time I spend in the morning - praying, sipping coffee, and coming up with my list - is a ritual ...
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG If you're doing what you think people might like, rather than doing what you like, people will s...
FUTURE If you're doing what you think people might like, rather than doing what you like, people will s...
NAYVADIUS CASH

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JOHN UPDIKE That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held...
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JOHN UPDIKE The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
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JOHN UPDIKE Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
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JOHN UPDIKE America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is free...
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JOHN UPDIKE By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and s...
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JOHN UPDIKE Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
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JOHN UPDIKE I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of ...
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JOHN UPDIKE I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip nove...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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JOHN UPDIKE Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other
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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.
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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.
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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