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 an...
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
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.
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
Like most incurable fibbers, she had an extravagant regard for the truth, which she expressed by sending up signals meant to indicate that she was lying.
I was here on earth because I chose to be.
This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit.
There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between one and two—a spiritual no-man’s-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments, and ratholes we all share, disarmed by the gul...
I do what I have to do, like everyone else, and one of the things I have to do is to serve my wife breakfast in bed.
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 compassiona...
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
The eternal puzzle of why people do that which is not in their interest, and have a desire to lose what is most precious to them, makes Cheever fascinated by the deepest destructions.
She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an end...
I did another commercial. Don't lose your loved ones, I wrote, because of excessive radioactivity. Don't be a wallflower at the dance because of strontium 90 in your bones. Don't be a victim of fallou...
Among the rewards of his expatriation were a heightened awareness of what he saw and an exhilarating sense of freedom. Mixed with the love we hold for our native country is the fact that it is the pla...
The sounds next door served as a kind of trip wire: I seemed to stumble and fall on my face, skinning and bruising myself here and there and scattering my emotional and intellectual possessions. There...