Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.

The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.

The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.

I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.

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

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.