John Cheever Quotes
Collection of top 74 famous quotes about John Cheever
John Cheever Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational John Cheever quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
A page of good prose remains invincible.
— John Cheever
Bradish had never had any occasion to experience self-righteousness other than the self-righteousness of the sinner.
— John Cheever
His life was not confined and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape.
— John Cheever
That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
— John Cheever
I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
— John Cheever
Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.
— John Cheever
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life
— John Cheever
Artemis was the sort of man who frequently proposed marriage, but at thirty he still had no wife.
— John Cheever
I told her everything I could think of, even about my father being buried in the Protestant Cemetery.
— John Cheever
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
— John Cheever
Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
— John Cheever
Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.
— John Cheever
This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit.
— John Cheever
For Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues.
— John Cheever
I was here on earth because I chose to be.
— John Cheever
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?
— John Cheever
I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.
— John Cheever
There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
— John Cheever
Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
— John Cheever
Justina's life had been exemplary, but by ending it she seemed to have disgraced us all.
— John Cheever
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.
— John Cheever
When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
— John Cheever
The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.
— John Cheever
He shook out a copy of The Manchester Guardian. He had noticed that conservative newspapers sometimes inspired confidence in the shy.
— John Cheever
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?
— John Cheever
Grief was for the others; sorrow and pain were for the others; some terrible mistake had been made.
— John Cheever
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
— John Cheever
I write to make sense of my life.-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey — John Cheever
I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.
— John Cheever
The short story is the literature of the nomad.
— John Cheever
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
— John Cheever
How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?
— John Cheever
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.
— John Cheever
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
— John Cheever
So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle
— John Cheever
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
— John Cheever
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
— John Cheever
Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.
— John Cheever
The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
— John Cheever
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
— John Cheever
Art is the triumph over chaos.
— John Cheever
The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
— John Cheever
IT WAS ONE of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, I drank too much last night.
— John Cheever
People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
— John Cheever
The belief that a crooked heart is betrayed by palsies, tics, and other infirmities dies hard.
— John Cheever
I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.
— John Cheever
My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.
— Irwin Shaw
