Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.

Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.

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

I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

Who reads short stories? one is asked, and I like to think that they are read by men and women in the dentist's office, waiting to be called to the chair; they are read on transcontinental plane trips instead of watching banal and vulgar films spin out the time between our coasts; they are read by discerning and well-informed men and women who seem to feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us.