I was here on earth because I chose to be.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can...

I write to make sense of my life.”-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever – A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

When you get to be as old and as rich as I am, it’s hard to meet people.

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more...

I’ve been homesick for countries I’ve never been, and longed to be where I couldn’t be.

Seated at the table, high in her firmament of gin, she looked critically at her brother and his wife, remembering some real or imagined injustice of her youth, for with any proximity the constellations of...

Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came from the crowns...

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle…. A page of good prose seems to me the...

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms…where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our...

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of a sleeping mind.

I felt that he was a captive of financial and sentimental commitments, like every other man I know, and that he was no more free to fall in love with a strange woman he saw...