My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever

Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.

The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.

I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.

Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms.

Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life

People who light up like Roman candles come down in the dark very quickly.

If football players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.

The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.

A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him.

As smart technologies become more intrusive, they risk undermining our autonomy by suppressing behaviors that someone somewhere has deemed undesirable.

We forget our guilt when we have confessed it to another, but the other does not usually forget it.

I am not a journalist. I'm just a guy who cares. I'm sorry. I'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about my country.

He is also handsome," replied Elizabeth, "which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete.

If the past is not resolved, future relationships will suffer. Let your heart heal, before you open the door to another.

Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

Every actor wants more offers, but I get enough and I do like to be busy.

If you read the 'Daily Mail,' you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery.

Girls are always talking about electricity in their romance, but none are too happy to actually be electrocuted, apparently. Bloody confusing, is what it is.