John Updike

"Sex is like money; only too much is enough."

"Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling."

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

"The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop."

"Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules."

"Like water, blood must run or grow scum."

"Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars."

"I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken."

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

"It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian."

"By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved."

"Time is our element, not a mistaken invader."

"His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill."

"All men are boys time is trying to outsmart."

"I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs."

"We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable."

"I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either."

"A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world."

"Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism."

"Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone."

"...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."

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

"Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours."

"A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens."

"The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion."

"Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity."

"He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain."

"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."

"He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance."

"I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is — its irresistible charm — a fire."

"There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't."

"We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell."

"Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself."

"It rots a writer’s brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician."

"In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse- quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up."

"For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do — they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities."

"Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art."

"Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency."

"The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at 40,000 feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar — these bring portents with them and awaken a sense of relation with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose."

"Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit."

"Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile."

"As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world..."

"He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks."

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

"What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it."

"He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame."

"The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of ‘any place,’ prelude to the ultimate, ‘Why am I me?’—ignites panic in his heart."

"The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there."

"The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you."

"There was a beauty here, refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America."