“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...”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“We are all so guilty at the way we have allowed the world around us to become more ugly and tasteless every year that we surrender to terror and steep ourselves in it.”

“Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion”

“All others are outside myself;I lock my door and bar them outThe turmoil, tedium, gad-about.I lock my door upon myself,And bar them out; but who shall wallSelf from myself, most loathed of all?If I...”