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
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
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
John Cheever
Art is the triumph over chaos.
John Cheever
Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.
John Cheever
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
He had that spooky bass voice meant to announce that he had entered the kingdom of manhood, but Rosalie knew that he was still outside the gates.
John Cheever
He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately and contented way, as if it contained money and securities.
John Cheever
Homesickness is nothing Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
John Cheever
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss-you can't do it alone.
John Cheever
I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
John Cheever
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
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
John Cheever
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
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
That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
John Cheever
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John Cheever
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
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
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
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
John Cheever
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
John Cheever
|
Type:
Writer
Date of Birth:
1912-05-27
Year of Death:
1982
Nationality:
American |
