To be a human being is to be in a state of tension... -John Updike

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

John Updike Quotes to Explore

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered....

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movi...

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthe...

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit....

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went....

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five....

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness....

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner....

We are most alive when we're in love....

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramificatio...

Dreams Quotes to Explore

You can live your dreams, and you can believe in magic. You can live your dreams, and you can be yourself....

The truth is, successful people are not ten times smarter than you. They don't really work ten times harder than you. So why are they successful? Beca...

I've always felt like my job is to protect my sister. Even growing up, on the playground, when my sister was too shy, I would speak for her... I even ...

America is not just a democracy, it represents a certain culture of competitive mobility and personality aspirations, politics is not merely a clash o...

When you have goals and dreams and things that you've been wanting your whole life, and then they actually start happening and you start checking thin...

My work is to reach people with ideas, hopes, dreams, encouragement, insight, and revelation. That's what an actor wants to do....

Nobody is going to love and honor your dreams like yourself. It's really not looking for someone to be your superhero but for us to save ourselves and...

My life turned out to be beyond my greatest dreams....

The public's appetite for what sensible newspapers call 'personality journalism' and what I call gossip is insatiable. It will never, ever stop growin...

I don't really think dreams have real meaning. Some people believe in that. I just think it's your brain, after a day of crazy random pieces of inform...