Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want. — John Updike Copy Share Image
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of… — John Updike Copy Share Image
People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. — John Updike Copy Share Image
“But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by… — John Updike Copy Share Image
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. — John Updike Copy Share Image
“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun just started”;” — John Updike Copy Share Image
For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha… — John Updike Copy Share Image
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
In a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to… — John Updike Copy Share Image
From the standpoint of a Middle Eastern citizen, Americans look like a bully forcing our way of life on the Islamic way… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves… — John Updike Copy Share Image
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are… — John Updike Copy Share Image
...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle. — John Updike Copy Share Image
“The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug… — John Updike Copy Share Image
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he… — John Updike Copy Share Image
