I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey — John Cheever Copy Share Image
Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone. — John Cheever Copy Share Image
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone. — John Cheever Copy Share Image
The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
“To write well, to write passionately, to be less inhibited, to be warmer, to be more self-critical, to recognize the power of… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego. — John Cheever Copy Share Image
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness. — John Cheever Copy Share Image
Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write. — John Cheever Copy Share Image
For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
“She perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how cruel and frail it was, like a worn piece of burlap, patched with… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“I dream that someone in space says to me: So let us rush, then, to see the world. It is shaped like an egg,… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers. — John Cheever Copy Share Image
Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
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… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
“His stepmother -wearing a nightgown for comfort and a flowered hat for looks- had spent her days sitting in their parlor window in Baltimore… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world.… — John Cheever Copy Share Image
