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 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.
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 beloved and mistaken world.
A NEW CONQUEST always had a wonderful effect on Charlie. He became overnight generous, understanding, inexhaustibly good-humored, relaxed, kind to cats, dogs, and strangers, expansive, and compassionate.
Homesickness is absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. You don’t really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don’t have, or haven’t been able to find.
The image of a cleanly, self-possessed man exploiting his solitude was not easy to come by, but then he had not expected that it would be.
Standing in the rain outside the door of Percy’s old house, we seemed bound together not by blood and not by love but by a sense that the world and its works were hostile.
Percy must have perceived, early in her marriage, that her husband’s lechery was compulsive and incurable, but she was determined, like any other lover, to authenticate her suspicion.
You might have said that his look was thoughtful until you realized that he was not a thoughtful man. It was the earnest and contained look of those who are a little hard of hearing or a little stupid.
When you get to be as old and as rich as I am, it’s hard to meet people.
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.
Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
All literary men are Red Sox fans – to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.