John Cheever Quotes

80 quotes in 1180 categories

• Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.
• Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
• Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
• People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
• Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.
• 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 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…
• I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.
• The short story is the literature of the nomad.
• A page of good prose remains invincible.
• The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.
• ...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…
• How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
• 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…
• The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.

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