John Cheever Quotes

80 quotes in 1180 categories

• 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,…
• I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.
• 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,…
• I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
• I was here on earth because I chose to be.
• I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.
• 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…
• Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.
• 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…
• 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…
• To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
• 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…
• Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
• 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.
• One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories of…

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