I write to make sense of my life."-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.

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.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

Character is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that’s right is to get by, and the only thing that’s wrong is to get caught.

Religion is not a book, it is not an institution, and it is not even a person. True Religion is realization of the self.

I get described as 'interesting' a lot. People often call me odd, too. Maybe they mean ugly. Given the services of a plastic surgeon, I would get a pair of cheekbones.

Eliminate the impossible. Then if nothing remains, some part of the 'impossible' was possible.

It takes effort to promote what you do until it becomes habit.

Death is at any time blessed but it is twice blessed for a warrior who dies for his cause, that is, truth.

The calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for.

TNC was once limited by the resources it could directly marshal to buy land. But teaching people a new idea is incredibly more scalable.

Somebody will come backstage and go, 'You saved me.' And I will have to say, 'Stop right there. You saved yourself.'

Great talent has always a little madness mixed up with it.