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

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.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

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

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

I think politics is extremely funny in and of itself.

My musician friends are banned from playing concerts in China because they share the same views as I do. My name cannot appear on the web, because my opinion is different from the Party.

In the face of anger, the best response is a burst of tenderness.

Hillary Clinton is unworthy of being the President of the United States; she has done nothing important that is good

Today we are searching for things in nature that are hidden behind the veil of appearance... We look for and paint this inner, spiritual side of nature.

I'm not under too much of an illusion of how smart or un-smart I am because filmmaking ultimately is about teamwork.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

Centralized health dictatorship.

A pacifist male is a contradiction in terms. Most self-described "pacifists" are not pacific; they simply assume false colors. When the wind changes, they hoist the Jolly Roger.

We need to use overwhelming air power. We need to be arming the Kurds. We need to be fighting and killing ISIS where they are.