John Hoyer Updike

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

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

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

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

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.

It was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

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.

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.

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.

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