Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Art is the triumph over chaos.
A page of good prose remains invincible.
I was here on earth because I chose to be.
The short story is the literature of the nomad.
I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.
Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.
I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.
I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.
Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.
To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.
How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?
People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.
Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.
For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.
It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.
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.
I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another's river views.
The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs.
Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.