“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.”

“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 beautif...”

“I dream that someone in space says to me: So let us rush, then, to see the world. It is shaped like an egg, covered with seas and continents, warmed and lighted by the sun. It has churches of indes...”

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

“Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth.”

“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 most serious dialogue that well-informed...”

“Lost Time is never found again.”

“How you spend your time is more important than how you spend your money. Money mistakes can be corrected, but time is gone forever.”

“Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”