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."

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

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

"[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it."

"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."

"The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors."

"Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief."

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