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

Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly that we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.

Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.

I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.

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