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...
Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.
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.
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.
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
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.
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...
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
We obscure our self-knowledge with anxiety; that it is not what we desire but what we fear and dread we may desire that impedes us.
I told her everything I could think of, even about my father being buried in the Protestant Cemetery.
Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
These napkins are more holy than righteous, Mrs. Wapshot said, and most of her conversation at table was made up of just such chestnuts, saws and hoary puns.
If there was anything really wrong with Shady Hill, anything that you could put your finger on, it was the fact that the village had no public library – no foxed copies of Pascal, smelling of cabbage;...
I felt that he was a captive of financial and sentimental commitments, like every other man I know, and that he was no more free to fall in love with a strange woman he saw on a street corner than he...
I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.
How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?