My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever

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

If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.

I've gone on the wagon, but my body doesn't believe it.

Posterity makes the judgments. There are going to be a lot of surprises in store for everybody.

In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that.

Writing is like a contact sport, like football. Why do kids play football? They can get hurt on any play, can't they? Yet they can't wait until Saturday comes around so they can play on the high school team, or the college team, and get smashed around. Writing is like that. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it!