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John Cheever Quotes

1912–1982 United States

John Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer.

United States
Novelists
Short story writers

Also known as: Cheever, John

Random John Cheever quote

28 quotes

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two.

The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

All literary men are Red Sox fans—to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.

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.

Homesickness is nothing … Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

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.

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.

I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.

The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.

The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

Art is the triumph over chaos.

The Stories of John Cheever Knopf (1978)

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 his excellence.

The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places. That’s the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

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.

The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

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.

James Charlton's The Writer’s Quotation Book (1980)

Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)

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.

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.

The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

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.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John Cheever (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.