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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
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John Updike
Age: 76 †
Born: 1932
Born: March 18
Died: 2009
Died: January 27
Art Critic
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
John Hoyer Updike
Everybody
Whiskey
Tells
Breath
Breaths
More quotes by John Updike
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
John Updike
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike
It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
John Updike
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
John Updike
An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
John Updike
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
John Updike
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
Human was the music, natural was the static.
John Updike
From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
John Updike
My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike
Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
John Updike
The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
John Updike
Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
John Updike
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
