John Cheever Quotes (32 Quotes)


    We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.

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

    He had that spooky bass voice meant to announce that he had entered the kingdom of manhood, but Rosalie knew that he was still outside the gates.

    My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.

    The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.


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

    A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.

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

    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.

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

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

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

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

    People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.

    For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

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

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

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

    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.

    What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.

    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.

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

    Strange and predatory and truly dangerous, car thieves and muggers -- they seem to jeopardize all our cherished concepts, even our self-esteem, our property rights, our powers of love, our laws and pleasures. The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery.

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

    A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

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

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

    Homesickness is ... absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.... You don't really long foranother country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.

    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.

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

    He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately and contented way, as if it contained money and securities.



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