John Cheever

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

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

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.