John Updike People Quotations

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

Cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.

The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.

Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.