K.M. Updike > K.M.'s Quotes

“Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people. ”
― W.C. Fields

“Eden, I had planned to use that information to hold you grandfather overfire. I intended to force him to return what Townsend stole through manipulating my mother. I wouldn't want you to think otherwise. I went to a lot of trouble to get that story over a two year period of my life."
She knew it had cost him. It was still costing him because he had allowed his work to slip through his fingers.
And you surrendered it," she said. "Why? You could have won. Grandfather would have given you what you watned to keep you from publishing the story. He would have made Townsend cooperate."
Rafe looked off in the distance...
If I had, Eden, I would have lost more than Hanalei. I weighed everything in a balance and decided there was something I wanted even more.”
― Linda Lee Chaikin

“She looked up at him and loved what she saw.”
― Linda Lee Chaikin

“You can never tell about those Yankees!”
― L.M. Montgomery

“I don't believe you know anything about a man like me or a country like this. It takes rough men, Miss Fair, to tame a rough country; rough men, but good men. Your father is in that class. As for you, I don't think you'd measure up, and you'll do well to leave it. You're a hothouse flower, very soft, very appealing and very useless...In the world you are going to, men want pretty useless women. They want toys for their lighte moments, and we have those women out here, too, only we have another name for them. We want women who can make a home, and if need be, handle a rifle.”
― Louis L'Amour

“Sister. She is your mirror, shining back at you with a world of possibilities. She is your witness, who sees you at your worst and best, and loves you anyway. She is your partner in crime, your midnight companion, someone who knows when you are smiling, even in the dark. She is your teacher, your defense attorney, your personal press agent, even your shrink. Some days, she's the reason you wish you were an only child.”
― Barbara Alpert

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.”
― Peter De Vries

“Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
― Gene Fowler

“Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.”
― G. K. Chesterton

“If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“When you put something down that happened, people often don't believe it; whereas, you can make up anything, and people assume it must have happened to you.”
― Andrew Holleran

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.”
― Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.”
― William Wordsworth

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone”
― John Updike

“Adapt your style, if you wish, to admit the color of slang or freshness of neologism, but hang tough on clarity, precision, structure, grace.”
― William Safire

“Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.”
― Lillian Hellman

“Writing in the incurable itch that possesses many.”
― Juvenal

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”
― William Faulkner

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Always grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, send your thumbs into his windpipe in the second, and hold him against the wall until the tagline.”
― Paul O'Neill

“A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.”
― Karl Kraus

“Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.”
― Blaise Pascal

“The free-lance writer is one who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
― Robert Benchley

“I write to discover what I think”
― Daniel J. Boorstin