John Cheever Quotes

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

  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

• 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

• Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

  John Cheever

• When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

  John Cheever

  Topics in Family

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

  John Cheever

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

  John Cheever

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

  John Cheever

  Topics in Wisdom

• 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 woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.

  John Cheever

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

  John Cheever

  Tags in Homesickness

• Strange and predatory and truly dangerous, car thieves and muggers — they seem to jeopardize all our cherished concepts, even our self-esteem, our property rights, our powers of love, our laws and pleasures. The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery.

  John Cheever

• People named John and Mary never divorce. For better or for worse, in madness and in saneness, they seem bound together for eternity by their rudimentary nomenclature. They may loathe and despise one another, quarrel, weep, and commit mayhem, but they are not free to divorce. Tom, Dick, and Harry can go to Reno on a whim, but nothing short of death can separate John and Mary.

  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

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

  John Cheever

• It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

  John Cheever

  Topics in Nature

• Art is the triumph over chaos.

  John Cheever

  Topics in Art

John Cheever (36)

Birth:	27th May, 1912
Death:	18th June, 1982
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

About

John William Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, USA. He was an American novelist and short story writer. He studied at Thayer Academy, a private day school, and Quincy High School, Massachusetts. He is "now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century." He wrote several novels include: The Wapshot Chronicle (Won- National Book Award for Fiction in 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (Won- William Dean Howells Medal in 1965), Bullet Park, Falconer, and Oh What a Paradise It Seems (novella). He wrote several short stories include: The Way Some People Live, The Enormous Radio, The Five-Forty-Eight, Reunion, The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, The World of Apples (Nominations: National Book Award for Fiction), The Stories of John Cheever (Won- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979, National Book Critics Circle Award in 1979), and The Swimmer.

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