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

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

How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives [sex], as if-jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts-we were describing the changing of a flat tire?

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.

The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.

At my back I hear the word-"homosexual"-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.