A Quote by John Updike

In a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them, then you are reduced to writing about spectacular unreal people. You know, James Bond or something, and you cook up adventures.

John Updike

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About Adventures Base Bond Century Cook Democracy Engage Fiction Issues James James Bond Know Ordinary Ordinary People People Real People Reduced Something Spectacular Them Then Unreal Up Writing Your

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John Updike
American - Novelist
March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009

I tend to read mostly 20th-century fiction, 20th-, 21st-century fiction in Italian.

Jhumpa Lahiri

India is the Saudi Arabia of human resources for the 21st century. The power that we used to get from oil in 20th century, we will get it from people like you in 21st century.

Rahul Gandhi

I have a thing that I do when I meet famous people where I try to play it really cool. Sometimes I pretend like I don't know them.I was at this party and James Bond was there. Daniel Craig, but I think he goes by James Bond. Anyway, my wife is in love with him. He was in a tuxedo looking all James Bondish.

Rob Huebel

If we're to have a future in the 21st century, we'll want to be able to say, "Now what was the 20th century like in the United States of America, the most powerful of all countries of that century? What was it like to be an ordinary person?"

Studs Terkel

The 20th century taught us how far unbridled evil can and will go when the world fails to confront it. It is time that we heed the lessons of the 20th century and stand up to these murderers. It is time that we end genocide in the 21st century.

Allyson Schwartz

That's a chapter - the last chapter - of the 20th ... 20th ... the 21st century that most of us would rather forget. The last chapter of the 20th century. This is the first chapter of the 21st century.

George W. Bush

A stable 21st century society requires 21st century solutions not 20th century economics

Phil Harding

Novels shouldn’t aspire to answer questions, and I wouldn’t presume to offer advice about love or marriage in any case. What’s fascinating to me about marriage as a subject for fiction—a subject that fiction has taken on with gusto since the 19th century—is how unknowable other people’s relationships are. Even the marriages of your parents, your siblings, your closest friends always remain something of a mystery. Only in fiction can you pretend to know people completely.

Nell Freudenberger

The 19th century was a century of empires, the 20th century was a century of nation states. The 21st century will be a century of cities.

Wellington Webb

Computer science teaches and nurtures the type of thinking that 21st century citizens will need to address 21st century issues. We cannot know with any certainty what those challenges will be, but we can arm our students with the tools needed to address them.

Eric Adams

[In] the 21st century, the mainstream can satisfy your every whim. I guess the idea of walking around with groups of people dressed the same and saying, "I'm only into ska" or "I'm only into whatever" - is kind of restrictive in the 21st century. I don't know if it's a bad thing that these movements have run their course. I think what I miss about it is the collective experience.

Don Letts

The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives, and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.

Al Gore

The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives - and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.

Al Gore

Our culture is hung up on and overemphasises what can be derived from material objects. I think this is something quite new, over the past 200 or 300 years - that life has become about accumulating material wealth. The 21st century is not about accumulating material wealth like the 20th century. It's already eroding.

Tino Sehgal

Earlier this week ... scientists announced the completion of a task that once seemed unimaginable; and that is, the deciphering of the entire DNA sequence of the human genetic code. This amazing accomplishment is likely to affect the 21st century as profoundly as the invention of the computer or the splitting of the atom affected the 20th century. I believe that the 21st century will be the century of life sciences, and nothing makes that point more clearly than this momentous discovery. It will revolutionize medicine as we know it today.