Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading 'The Naked and the Dead' made him despair of his own 'confined talents.'
To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.
I can't write things. I'm embarrassed all the time about that, particularly if people don't know that about me.
At the beginning, I experienced writing as a sort of constraint. Starting so young as a writer is pitiable: it's beyond your powers; you have to lay bare things that are very heavy, and you don't have the means for that.
My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I've ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don't say I can write everything well.
It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.
The only thing that would ever embarrass me would be something I would write that would be badly written.
I try to write for women, but I suck at it. I really do.
