Top 100 John Cheever Quotes
#1. We obscure our self-knowledge with anxiety; that it is not what we desire but what we fear and dread we may desire that impedes us - a
John Cheever
#2. When you get to be as old and as rich as I am, it's hard to meet people.
John Cheever
#3. Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation,
John Cheever
#4. The study of Euclid put him into a compassionate and tranquil frame of mind, and illuminated, among other things, that his thinking and feeling had recently been crippled by confusion and despair.
John Cheever
#5. Percy must have perceived, early in her marriage, that her husband's lechery was compulsive and incurable, but she was determined, like any other lover, to authenticate her suspicion.
John Cheever
#6. When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
John Cheever
#7. Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
John Cheever
#8. Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
#9. It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.
John Cheever
#10. I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.
John Cheever
#11. Even a selected display of one's early work will be a naked history of one's struggle to receive an education in economics and love.
John Cheever
#12. Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.
John Cheever
#13. So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle
John Cheever
#14. All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life
John Cheever
#15. I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.
John Cheever
#16. Her hair was dyed, and her bloom was fading, and she must have been crowding forty, but she seemed to be one of those women who cling to the manners and graces of a pretty child of eight.
John Cheever
#17. This is being written abord the S.S. Augustus, three days at sea. My suitcase is full of peanut butter, and I am a fugitive from the suburbs of all large cities.
John Cheever
#18. 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
#19. For Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues.
John Cheever
#20. Literature has been our salvation, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.
John Cheever
#21. But now that she had made him her confidant, he saw that he could not change this relationship.
John Cheever
#22. There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.
John Cheever
#23. This is being written in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit.
John Cheever
#24. Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth.
John Cheever
#25. I do not understand the capricious lewdness of a sleeping mind.
John Cheever
#27. 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
#28. Long ago when they first invented the atomic bomb people used to worry about its going off and killing everybody, but they didn't know that mankind has enough dynamite right in his guts to tear the fucking plant to pieces.
John Cheever
#29. I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
John Cheever
#30. The belief that a crooked heart is betrayed by palsies, tics, and other infirmities dies hard.
John Cheever
#31. Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to reognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia at all.
John Cheever
#32. At my back I hear the word-"homosexual"-and it seems to split my world in two ... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.
John Cheever
#33. I was here on earth because I chose to be.
John Cheever
#34. Rachel's way was not so easy. When she lost her fat she became very pretty and quite fast. She smoked and drank and probably fornicated and the abyss that opens up before a pretty and an intemperate young woman is unfathomable.
John Cheever
#35. The image of a cleanly, self-possessed man exploiting his solitude was not easy to come by, but then he had not expected that it would be.
John Cheever
#36. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
John Cheever
#37. The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.
John Cheever
#38. I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.
John Cheever
#39. I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
John Cheever
#40. The novel remains for me one of the few forms ... where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.
John Cheever
#41. It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
John Cheever
#42. He was not a practical joke nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.
John Cheever
#43. Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked ... The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.
John Cheever
#44. The landings were dirty and the walls were bare. This stairway brought me into the balcony, and I sat there in the dark, thinking that nothing now was going to save me, that no pretty girl with new shoes was going to cross my path in time.
John Cheever
#45. The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
John Cheever
#46. These napkins are more holy than righteous, Mrs. Wapshot said, and most of her conversation at table was made up of just such chestnuts, saws and hoary puns.
John Cheever
#47. Grief was for the others; sorrow and pain were for the others; some terrible mistake had been made.
John Cheever
#48. It was still mild when they walked home from the party, and Irene looked up at the spring stars. "How far that little candle throws its beams," she exclaimed. "So shines a good dead in a naughty world.
John Cheever
#49. These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.
John Cheever
#50. Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos ... to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.
John Cheever
#51. 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, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.
John Cheever
#52. Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
John Cheever
#53. I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.
John Cheever
#54. You might have said that his look was thoughtful until you realized that he was not a thoughtful man. It was the earnest and contained look of those who are a little hard of hearing or a little stupid.
John Cheever
#55. Isn't it true that when some couple celebrates their tenth or fifteenth anniversary they seem far from triumphant? In fact they seem duped while dirty Uncle Harry, the rake, seems to wear the laurels.
John Cheever
#56. IT WAS ONE of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, I drank too much last night.
John Cheever
#57. You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.
John Cheever
#58. I am like a prisoner who is trying to escape from jail by the wrong route. For all one knows, that door may stand open, although I continue to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon.
John Cheever
#59. 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
#60. Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.
John Cheever
#61. 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 evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.
John Cheever
#62. His life was not confined and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape.
John Cheever
#63. For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.
John Cheever
#64. Hurry, hurry, hurry, she said, for it was dark then, and she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day, and that day was nearly over.
John Cheever
#65. The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John Cheever
#66. Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.
John Cheever
#67. When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
John Cheever
#68. Oh, how wonderful and rich and
strange life can be when you stop playing out the roles that your parents and their friends wrote out
for you.
John Cheever
#69. 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
#70. Bradish had never had any occasion to experience self-righteousness other than the self-righteousness of the sinner.
John Cheever
#71. Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
John Cheever
#72. The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs.
John Cheever
#73. ...years of resolute self-denial, instead of rewarding him with reserves of fortitude, had left him more than ordinarily susceptible to temptation.
John Cheever
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I do what I have to do, like everyone else, and one of the things I have to do is to serve my wife breakfast in bed.
John Cheever
#77. The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
John Cheever
#78. Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor.
John Cheever
#79. Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
John Cheever
#80. Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.
John Cheever
#81. How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives [sex], as if-jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts-we were describing the changing of a flat tire?
John Cheever
#82. The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
John Cheever
#83. I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder.
John Cheever
#84. What I did not understand, as I walked down Fifth Avenue that afternoon, was how a world that had seemed so dark could, in a few minutes, become so sweet.
John Cheever
#85. Another historical peculiarity of the place was the fact that its large mansions, those relics of another time, had not been reconstructed to serve as nursing homes for that vast population of comatose and the dying who were kept alive, unconscionably, through trailblazing medical invention.
John Cheever
#86. Adultery and cruelty have well-marked courses of action but what can a man do when his wife wants to appear naked on the stage?
John Cheever
#87. I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
John Cheever
#88. You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women. He had damaged, you might say, the ear's innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves.
John Cheever
#89. People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
John Cheever
#90. She was his potchke, his fleutchke, his notchke, his motchke, his everything that the speech of St. Botolphs left unexpressed. She was his little, little squirrel.
John Cheever
#91. Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story.
John Cheever
#92. There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
John Cheever
#93. How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?
John Cheever
#94. I told her everything I could think of, even about my father being buried in the Protestant Cemetery.
John Cheever
#95. Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
John Cheever
#96. I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.
John Cheever
#97. 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 not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.
John Cheever
#98. To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
John Cheever
#100. Of the four poets with whom Bascomb was customarily grouped one had shot himself, one had drowned himself, one had hanged himself, and the fourth had died of delirium tremens.
John Cheever
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