"A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.“


-George Saunders

posted in intelligence


A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.

Other Quotes You Might Like

Discover more inspiring quotes from our collection

"Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another."

-George Saunders

truthView Quote
"I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar."

-George Saunders

sympathyView Quote
"I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society."

-George Saunders

societyView Quote
"I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I'm in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life - or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations."

-George Saunders

positiveView Quote
"If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too."

-George Saunders

positiveView Quote
"Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented in a more conceptual way."

-George Saunders

politicsView Quote

More Quotes About intelligence

Explore other inspiring quotes in this category

"I wasn't privy to all of the intelligence that was coming in about Guatemala, but I did see the traffic that was coming in from Guatemala City, because it was very relevant to me, and of course I exchanged what I had with the chief of station in Guatemala City."

-E. Howard Hunt

intelligenceView Quote
"Foreign Ministry guys don't become agents. Party officials, the Foreign Ministry nerds, tend not to volunteer to Western intelligence agencies."

-Aldrich Ames

intelligenceView Quote
"We had periodic crises in this country when the technical intelligence didn't support the policy. We had the bomber gap, the missile gap."

-Aldrich Ames

intelligenceView Quote
"The resistance of policy-makers to intelligence is not just founded on an ideological presupposition. They distrust intelligence sources and intelligence officials because they don't understand what the real problems are."

-Aldrich Ames

intelligenceView Quote
"There are so many things a large intelligence espionage organization can do to justify its existence, that people can get promotions for, because it could result in results."

-Aldrich Ames

intelligenceView Quote
"Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union."

-Aldrich Ames

intelligenceView Quote