The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

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

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

I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.

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

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