The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.
You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.
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?
Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts.
It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.
The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.
I write to make sense of my life. " -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
That's my main thing: I want to be on the level those guys [Derrick Rose,Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant] are on.
In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.
So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.
When I hear a writer say that they ‘put in a call,’ I want to pull my hair out.