John Cheever famous quotes

If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.
-- John Cheever

#Sorry #Fog #Essence

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

#Summer #Morning #Splendid

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.
-- John Cheever

#Rain #Men #Intelligent

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.
-- John Cheever

#Lonely #Being Alone #Autumn

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

#Writing #Kissing #Reader

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

#Alcohol #Metaphor #Terrible

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

#Fiction #Experimentation

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

#Inspirational #Country #Travel

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

#Knives #House #Taste

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.
-- John Cheever

#Despair #World #Literature

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

#Country #Long #People

Art is the triumph over chaos.
-- John Cheever

#Art #Triumph #Chaos

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.
-- John Cheever

#Cancer #Mean #Cat

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

#Family #Leaving #Remember

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

#Speech #Communicate #Bores

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

#Writing #Ego #Promise

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

#Two #Evil #Good And Evil

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.
-- John Cheever

#Dream #Art #Lying

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

#Writing #Needs #Make Sense

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

#Men #Yankees #Fans

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

#Kings #Dark #Night

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.
-- John Cheever

#Grief #Rain #Writing

The short story is the literature of the nomad.
-- John Cheever

#Stories #Literature #Short Story

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

#Different #Body #Lovers

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.
-- John Cheever

#Rain #Taken #Light

My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.
-- John Cheever

#New York #Loss #Cities

The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.
-- John Cheever

#Children #Philosophy #Book

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.
-- John Cheever

#Men #Records #Longing

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

#Heart #Self #Sand

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

#Philosophy #People #Confusion

At my back I hear the word-"homosexual"-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.
-- John Cheever

#Ignorance #Light #Two

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

#World #Trust In The Lord #Lord

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
-- John Cheever

#Dream #Sleep #Mind

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

#Love #People #Joy

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

#Energy #Fur #Coats

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly that we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.
-- John Cheever

#Art #Exercise #Choices

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

#Dog #Children #Men

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.
-- John Cheever

#New York #Cities #Rivers

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

#Home #People #World

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

#Way #Exit #Remember

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.
-- John Cheever

#Beautiful #Country #Believe

The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.
-- John Cheever

#Lying #Night #Sky

She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.
-- John Cheever

#Night #Might #Coffins

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

#Writing #Blake #Make Sense

I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.
-- John Cheever

#Numbers #Hands #Telephones

I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.
-- John Cheever

#Taken #Class #Decision

The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.
-- John Cheever

#Baseball #Men #Play

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

#Baseball #Play #Swim

The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.
-- John Cheever

#Destiny #Evil #Imagination

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

#Savages #Shame #Vacant

I was here on earth because I chose to be.
-- John Cheever

#Earth

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

#Love You #Criticism #Possibility

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

#Heart #Irony #Mystery

I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder.
-- John Cheever

#Love #Rain #Snow

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

#Goes On #Tvs #Doughnut

Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts.
-- John Cheever

#Beautiful #Children #Men

How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives [sex], as if-jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts-we were describing the changing of a flat tire?
-- John Cheever

#Sex #Nuts #Tire

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.
-- John Cheever

#Dream #Pain #Writing

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.
-- John Cheever

#Elderly #Trout #Stories

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. Where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.
-- John Cheever

#Struggle #Men #Records

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.
-- John Cheever

#Views #Rivers #Rude

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.
-- John Cheever

#Death #Drug #Crux

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.
-- John Cheever

#Friendship #Light #Smell

Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to reognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia at all.
-- John Cheever

#Friendship #Athletic #Exaltation

A page of good prose remains invincible.
-- John Cheever

#Pages #Invincible #Prose

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

#Determination #Light #Looks

...the sounds next door served as a kind of trip wire: I seemed to stumble and fall on my face, skinning and bruising myself here and there and scattering my emotional and intellectual possessions. There was no point in pretending that I had not fallen, for when we are stretched out in the dirt we must pick ourselves up and brush off our clothes. This then, in a sense, is what I did, reviewing my considered opinions on marriage, constancy, man's nature, and the importance of love. When I had picked up my possessions and repaired my appearance, I fell asleep.
-- John Cheever

#Love #Fall #Men

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

#Mean #People #Alarms

Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor.
-- John Cheever

#Husband #Dark #Rainy Day

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

#Believe #Writing #I Believe

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.
-- John Cheever

#Spiritual #Prayer #Smell

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.
-- John Cheever

#Writing #Nuclear #Roles

Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
-- John Cheever

#Hair #Church #Stones

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

#Disappointment #Adults #Culture

Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
-- John Cheever

#Pain #Opium

I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
-- John Cheever

#Dream #Faces #Fame

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.
-- John Cheever

#Men #Organization #Perfection