To write well, to write passionately, to be less inhibited, to be warmer, to be more self-critical, to recognize the power of as well as the force of lust, to write, to love.
This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit.
Nada le esperaba en su apartamento. No había ni una mujer, ni un hombre, ni un perro, ni un gato, y probablemente la cinta de su contestador automático estaría en blanco; además, el barrio donde vivía...
I am like a prisoner who is trying to escape from jail by the wrong route. For all one knows, that door may stand open, although I continue to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon.
Here she barked out her greetings in Italian, anxious to disassociate herself from the horseless American cowboys and above all from her own kind, the truly lost and unwanted, who move like leaves aro...
Chicken began to cry then or seemed to cry, to weep or seemed to weep, until they heard the sound of a grown man weeping, an old man who slept on a charred mattress, whose life savings in tattoos had...
Artemis was the sort of man who frequently proposed marriage, but at thirty he still had no wife.
And walking back from the river I remember the galling loneliness of my adolescence, from which I do not seem to have completely escaped. It is the sense of the voyeur, the lonely, lonely boy with no...
Adultery and cruelty have well-marked courses of action but what can a man do when his wife wants to appear naked on the stage?
I write to make sense of my life."-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle
This is being written abord the S.S. Augustus, three days at sea. My suitcase is full of peanut butter, and I am a fugitive from the suburbs of all large cities.
There was some faint coughing, a moan, and then a man spoke. Are you all right, darling? he asked. Yes, a woman said wearily. Yes, I'm all right, I guess, and then she added with great feeling, But yo...
Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came from the crowns of all the tall trees. Why did...
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable, even to a purblind waiter,
The belief that a crooked heart is betrayed by palsies, tics, and other infirmities dies hard.
She perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how cruel and frail it was, like a worn piece of burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never sa...
She came right up to me and put her snow-white hand on my arm. You poor boy, she murmured, you poor boy. I'm not a boy, and I'm not poor, and I wished the hell she would get away. She has a clever fac...
Rachel’s way was not so easy. When she lost her fat she became very pretty and quite fast. She smoked and drank and probably fornicated and the abyss that opens up before a pretty and an intemperate y...
Oh what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestim...