Wealth & Money Quote by John Updike

Updike’s line lands because it smuggles a moral critique inside a joke that sounds like cocktail-party wisdom. “Sex is like money” is the bait: two things we pretend to treat rationally, privately, even virtuously. Then he flips the expected proverb. We’re trained on “enough is enough,” the language of moderation and self-control. Updike’s version exposes the lie beneath that posture: in a consumer culture, “enough” is rarely a stable category. It’s an appetite that renegotiates its own limits the moment it’s fed.

The subtext is less about sex than about craving as a status system. Money is measurable and social; sex is supposedly intimate, but it’s also tallyable in the imagination, a place where conquest and validation blur. By equating them, Updike hints at the way desire gets monetized: accumulation becomes proof of vitality, masculinity, relevance. “Only too much is enough” is deliberately self-canceling logic, a neat verbal loop that mimics compulsion. It’s not that excess satisfies; excess becomes the new baseline, the only quantity that feels like it might finally quiet the hunger.

Context matters: Updike wrote in the long afterglow of mid-century American prosperity and sexual liberalization, when transgression could be repackaged as lifestyle. His fiction often tracks the ordinary man’s yearning dressed up as philosophy. The line needles that self-justification: the pursuit isn’t framed as joy or connection, but as acquisition. The wit is sharp because it’s recognizably ugly - and because it implicates the listener before they can object.