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"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."
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"You can certainly take the easy road and use the predictable and boring defaults like: How are you doing? How about this weather? What do you do for a living? Hi. My name is _________. What's yours? Blah, blah, blah, blah . . .Break out of the defaults you have been using for years. Shake it up. Make it fun. Make it memorable. Dive in with more engagement and interaction. Taking the initiative to be more creative will help you build a bridge to close the gap."

"Use language what you will, you can never say anything but what you are."

"Some words bring warmthjust bybeing next to each other."

"I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores."

"Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless."

"Listen to this, Nimit. Follow Coleman Hawkins' improvised lines very carefully. He is using them to tell us something. Pay very close attention. He is telling us the story of the free spirit that is doing everything it can to escape from within him. That same kind of spirit is inside me, inside you. There--you can hear it, I'm sure: the hot breath, the shivering heart. (Thailand)"

"Express your feelings, no matter what. Make your every word beautiful, bright, and lovely. Make your every thought creative, caring, and lively."

"The word in your mouth is anarchy."

"Even if you can't dance, you can shake your body. Even if you can't sing, you can make some noise."

"I thought of writing a summary about you, but when I finished it was a book."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser."

"There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals."

"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."

"No matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong - you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into."

"Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly."

"My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy."

"But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography."

"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."

"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."

"That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds."
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