When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.

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

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

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

A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

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.