John Cheever Quotes


"The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable."
- John Cheever
(Related: Love, People, Company, Deep, Joy)

"That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit."
- John Cheever
"People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy."
- John Cheever
(Related: People, Confusion, Fiction, Morals, Philosophy)

"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
(Related: Despair, Literature, Lovers, Salvation, World)

"It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong."
- John Cheever
(Related: Nothing, Summer, Wrong)

"I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind."
- John Cheever
(Related: Mind)

"The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness."
- John Cheever
(Related: Life, Sense, Usefulness)

"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
(Related: People, Adultery, American, Ceremony, Rain, Woman, Writer)

"All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life."
- John Cheever
(Related: Life, Men, Society, Fans, Literary, Yankee)

"When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places."
- John Cheever
(Related: Family)

"Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction."
- John Cheever
(Related: Fiction)

"Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego."
- John Cheever
(Related: Ego, Promises, Writers, Writing)

"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
(Related: Beauty, Power, Battle, Grief, Prose, Rain)

"Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house."
- John Cheever
(Related: Fear)

"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
(Related: Power, Ability, Consciousness, Danger, Literature, Will)

"Art is the triumph over chaos."
- John Cheever
(Related: Art, Chaos)

"Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time."
- John Cheever
(Related: Time, People, Homesickness, Nothing, World)

"I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone."
- John Cheever
(Related: Kiss)

"Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two."
- John Cheever
(Related: Wisdom, Knowledge, Strength, Evil)