A Quote by John Updike

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. — © John Updike
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
'I Just Might Pray' by The David Mayfield Parade has an upbeat tempo without being sugary sweet. 'I Just Might Pray' is an enjoyable track and is easily listened to. As a side note, the video for 'I Just Might Pray' is absolutely adorable.
What I’m saying is I think life is staggering and we’re just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given—it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.
It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.
If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doesn't get sleepy.
I think you keep two sets of books. In one set, you record the truth -- how well you are really doing. This is the secret set -- just for you and loved ones. In the other set are more modest entries and statements, and these are for public consumption!
Reading books might itself be a bit weird, but obviously okay, since books were part of school, and doing well in school was clearly a good thing. But comics were more like candy, just flashy wrappers without any nourishment. Cheap thrills.
People start panicking because they think it's the end of everything. But the fact is, you know, books survived movies; books survived TV. Books are surviving manga and anime. Books will always be there in one form or another. You just have a larger palette of entertainment options.
Creating a set list is like making a running order for an album. Certain things get pitted against one another that make more sense. One song sets another one off, or it might diminish it. You're just constantly looking for the next thing that's gonna make sense in a particular place.
I like books that aren't just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.
In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly. It might not be as early as 2013 but it will be soon, much earlier than 2040.
Melt their weapons, melt their hearts, melt their anger with love.
Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.
A kid might help another kid who fell into a river, and a kid might help another kid search for a lost baseball, but there isn't a kid I've met who will help another kid out of a humiliating situation. We just aren't built that way.
All of this strife on the political front might just be the death throes of another set of [less-honorable] American beliefs, that have, at their core, the notion that equality is something the privileged group "gives" to those not so privileged - a reaching down, as it were.
People race to achieve everything by a certain age in their life, be it 40, 50 or 60 - but with increasing life spans 50 or 60 might be just the beginning of a new career, or just the point when you begin to get into your stride. There used to be a syndrome of me retiring at 65 and then dying not long after because their life was stripped of meaning, without their work. But these days you may live another 20 or 30 years beyond 65 so you have to figure out where you can make another contribution.
The author with the greatest influence on me is my friend Stephen Harrigan, who critiques everything I write before I even bother to show it to my agent or editor. He's a truly great writer - author of Gates of the Alamo and other books you might know of, and his instincts about what's working in a story, and what's not, are just about perfect. My books would be very different without his influence.
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