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.

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.

Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked. . .The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.

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

The short story is the literature of the nomad.

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.

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