Top 100 Cheever Quotes
#1. A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.
Dylan Moran
#2. Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.
Mona Simpson
#3. (John Cheever thought that you couldn't even type a business letter without revealing something of your inner self - isn't that the truth?)
Mason Currey
#4. I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and that's very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.
Blake Bailey
#5. I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.
Amy Bloom
#6. It wasn't until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.
Kate Bernheimer
#7. I write to make sense of my life.
-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
John Cheever
#8. My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.
Irwin Shaw
#9. I thought Cheever was magnificent and that if I could write like him that would be the best I could do. And then I realized that what I really wanted to write had nothing to do with what he was doing.
Harry Mathews
#10. 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
#11. When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy. Sometimes it doesn't stop there.
Susan Cheever
#12. When you get to be as old and as rich as I am, it's hard to meet people.
John Cheever
#13. If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.
John Cheever
#14. Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation,
John Cheever
#15. 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
#16. Personal experience is the lightning of the soul; it transforms the heart in ways that leave the brain behind.
Susan Cheever
#17. 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
#18. When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
John Cheever
#19. Dog movies nowadays are not what dog movies were 50 or even 10 years ago. For one thing, the dogs have become better actors.
Benjamin Cheever
#20. Justina's life had been exemplary, but by ending it she seemed to have disgraced us all.
John Cheever
#21. Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
John Cheever
#22. The Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on a cold November day in 1620 because they were running out of beer.
Susan Cheever
#23. Standing in the rain outside the door of Percy's old house, we seemed bound together not by blood and not by love but by a sense that the world and its works were hostile.
John Cheever
#24. Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
#25. 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
#26. We can cherish nothing less than our random understanding of death and the earth-shaking love that draws us to one another ... Cleanliness and valor will be our watchwords. Nothing less will get us past the armed sentry and over the mountainous border.
John Cheever
#27. I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.
John Cheever
#28. 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
#29. Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.
John Cheever
#30. The program of A.A., as written by Bill Wilson and Dr. Smith, only has one purpose: to get you sober. That's it. To make you a better person, forget it. That was one of the things he came to understand in those years of trial and error. It has to be about only one thing.
Susan Cheever
#31. So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle
John Cheever
#32. All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life
John Cheever
#34. 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
#35. Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
John Cheever
#36. There is no other closeness in human life like the closeness between a mother and her baby - chronologically, physically, and spiritually they are just a few heartbeats away from being the same person.
Susan Cheever
#37. 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
#38. Here she barked out her greetings in Italian, anxious to disassociate herself from the horseless American cowboys and above all from her own kind, the truly lost and unwanted, who move like leaves around the edges of the world, gathering only long enough to wait in line and see if there is any mail
John Cheever
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. For Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues.
John Cheever
#42. Addiction isn't about substance - you aren't addicted to the substance, you are addicted to the alteration of mood that the substance brings.
Susan Cheever
#43. Literature has been our salvation, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.
John Cheever
#44. When you run a marathon, you mean it. We're built for running. We dream of flying. For now, though, we're built to run.
Benjamin Cheever
#45. Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst
Susan Cheever
#46. There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between one and two - a spiritual no-man's-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments, and ratholes we all share, disarmed by the gullibility of our hearts.
John Cheever
#47. I was swimming with the turd sharks in an ocean made of piss
Sam Cheever
#48. But now that she had made him her confidant, he saw that he could not change this relationship.
John Cheever
#49. I pull my power more tightly around me like a magic binky.
Sam Cheever
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. I do not understand the capricious lewdness of a sleeping mind.
John Cheever
#54. When Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, what he meant was that there are no happy families.
Susan Cheever
#56. I just
I know my own heart and I love you, Turner. And if you have even the tiniest shred of decency, you'll say something because I've said everything I possibly can, and I can't bear the silence, and
oh for heaven's sake! Will you at least blink?
He couldn't even manage that.
Julia Quinn
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
John Cheever
#60. The belief that a crooked heart is betrayed by palsies, tics, and other infirmities dies hard.
John Cheever
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. I was here on earth because I chose to be.
John Cheever
#65. He shook out a copy of The Manchester Guardian. He had noticed that conservative newspapers sometimes inspired confidence in the shy.
John Cheever
#66. Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?
John Cheever
#67. The CDC reported that 88,000 adults a year die of alcohol consumption.
Susan Cheever
#68. That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
John Cheever
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
John Cheever
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
John Cheever
#75. To Hades with you, fool, for God hath tired of you.
Sam Cheever
#77. 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
#78. It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
John Cheever
#79. A NEW CONQUEST always had a wonderful effect on Charlie. He became overnight generous, understanding, inexhaustibly good-humored, relaxed, kind to cats, dogs, and strangers, expansive, and compassionate.
John Cheever
#80. 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
#82. 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
#83. His stepmother -wearing a nightgown for comfort and a flowered hat for looks- had spent her days sitting in their parlor window in Baltimore drinking sherry out of a coffee cup.
John Cheever
#84. Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time.
Susan Cheever
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. I believe that the memoir is the novel of the 21st century; it's an amazing form that we haven't even begun to tap ... we're just getting started figuring out what the rules are.
Susan Cheever
#88. 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
#89. God, in his wisdom, sent us his angels, to whisper our names on the wind. God, in his anger, released his devils, to pester our souls to the end.
Sam Cheever
#90. Trace listened to the story, but how could he get excited? Francis had no powers that would let him re-create a brush with death - particularly in the atmosphere of a commuting train, journeying through a sunny countryside where already, in the slum gardens, there were signs of harvest.
John Cheever
#91. I think 12-step programs really work, rehab really works, certain types of therapies and talking to other addicts really work. There are a lot of things that work - that isn't the problem. The problem is getting the addicts to say they're addicts. The problem is admitting it.
Susan Cheever
#92. Grief was for the others; sorrow and pain were for the others; some terrible mistake had been made.
John Cheever
#93. 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
#94. Women's currency is their looks. Like it or not, the most powerful woman is an 18-year-old woman.
Susan Cheever
#95. So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect as if the force of live were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one's purest memories and ambitions ...
John Cheever
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
John Cheever
#100. I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.
John Cheever
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