John Cheever quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Cheever

John Cheever Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Cheever on Wise Famous Quotes.

A page of good prose remains invincible.

Bradish had never had any occasion to experience self-righteousness other than the self-righteousness of the sinner.

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

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

His life was not confined and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape.

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

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

I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.

Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.

Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.

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

Artemis was the sort of man who frequently proposed marriage, but at thirty he still had no wife.

I told her everything I could think of, even about my father being buried in the Protestant Cemetery.

...years of resolute self-denial, instead of rewarding him with reserves of fortitude, had left him more than ordinarily susceptible to temptation.

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

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

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

Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.

This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit.

For Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues.

When you get to be as old and as rich as I am, it's hard to meet people.

Adultery and cruelty have well-marked courses of action but what can a man do when his wife wants to appear naked on the stage?

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.

Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth.

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

I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another's river views.

Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.

There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.

Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.

Justina's life had been exemplary, but by ending it she seemed to have disgraced us all.

Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.

Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation,

Even a selected display of one's early work will be a naked history of one's struggle to receive an education in economics and love.

Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.

He shook out a copy of The Manchester Guardian. He had noticed that conservative newspapers sometimes inspired confidence in the shy.

Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?

Grief was for the others; sorrow and pain were for the others; some terrible mistake had been made.

He was not a practical joke nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.

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

So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.

The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs.

I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.

You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.

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.

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

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

The short story is the literature of the nomad.

I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.

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

We obscure our self-knowledge with anxiety; that it is not what we desire but what we fear and dread we may desire that impedes us - a

The image of a cleanly, self-possessed man exploiting his solitude was not easy to come by, but then he had not expected that it would be.

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

I do what I have to do, like everyone else, and one of the things I have to do is to serve my wife breakfast in bed.

Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.

The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.

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

Art is the triumph over chaos.

The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.

IT WAS ONE of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, I drank too much last night.

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

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.

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

The belief that a crooked heart is betrayed by palsies, tics, and other infirmities dies hard.

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

But now that she had made him her confidant, he saw that he could not change this relationship.

I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.

To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.