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"Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction."
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"She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.It didn't."

"Where do you think they've gone?' he said.'Where what?' said Lady Ramkin, temporarily halted.'The dragons. You know. Errol and his wi - female.''Oh, somewhere isolated and rocky, I should imagine,' said Lady Ramkin. 'Favourite country for dragons.''But it - she's a magical animal,' said Vimes. 'What'll happen when the magic goes away?'Lady Ramkin gave him a shy smile.'Most people seem to manage,' she said.She reached across the table and touched his hand."

"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."

"Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."

"Vampires did not avoid mirrors because they cast no reflection but because mirrors became so unflattering with the illusion of fuzzy focus wrenched away."

"Are you naked?" he rasped out. Swallowing hard, she nodded."

"Oh my God, you're such a guy!" "I'm glad you noticed." The glint in his dark eyes was purely wicked."

"Caleb shifted uncomfortably as he closed the door behind him. For a moment, he'd thought she'd been naked under the sheet. But, it had been a nude-colored type of top. Didn't seem to matter, the sight had kicked his fantasies into overdrive. She tried to hide herself, but the nightlight next to her bed cast a soft amber glow around her shining right through the thin sheet, illuminating her small pert breasts perfectly even through the top. He couldn't live under the same roof as her and not go insane. He would make an announcement tomorrow. She was off-limits."
Explore more quotes by John Cheever

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

"The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony."

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

"The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness."

"Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world."

"Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two."
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