John 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. 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

#6. I write to make sense of my life.
-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

John Cheever

#7. My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever.

Irwin Shaw

#8. 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

#9. When you get to be as old and as rich as I am, it's hard to meet people.

John Cheever

#10. 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

#11. Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation,

John Cheever

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

John Cheever

#15. Justina's life had been exemplary, but by ending it she seemed to have disgraced us all.

John Cheever

#16. Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.

John Cheever

#17. 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

#18. Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.

John Cheever

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

John Cheever

#22. 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

#23. Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.

John Cheever

#24. So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle

John Cheever

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

John Cheever

#26. 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

#27. Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.

John Cheever

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. For Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues.

John Cheever

#33. Literature has been our salvation, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

John Cheever

#34. 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

#35. But now that she had made him her confidant, he saw that he could not change this relationship.

John Cheever

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. I do not understand the capricious lewdness of a sleeping mind.

John Cheever

#40. Art is the triumph over chaos.

John Cheever

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

John Cheever

#44. The belief that a crooked heart is betrayed by palsies, tics, and other infirmities dies hard.

John Cheever

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. I was here on earth because I chose to be.

John Cheever

#48. He shook out a copy of The Manchester Guardian. He had noticed that conservative newspapers sometimes inspired confidence in the shy.

John Cheever

#49. 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

#50. That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

John Cheever

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

John Cheever

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.

John Cheever

#57. 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

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

John Cheever

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. Grief was for the others; sorrow and pain were for the others; some terrible mistake had been made.

John Cheever

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

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

John Cheever

#74. I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.

John Cheever

#75. I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.

John Cheever

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. To write well, to write passionately, to be less inhibited, to be warmer, to be more self-critical, to recognize the power of as well as the force of lust, to write, to love.

John Cheever

#79. IT WAS ONE of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, I drank too much last night.

John Cheever

#80. You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.

John Cheever

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.

John Cheever

#84. 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

#85. His life was not confined and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape.

John Cheever

#86. 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

#87. 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

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

John Cheever

#89. Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.

John Cheever

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

John Cheever

#91. 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

#92. Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.

John Cheever

#93. 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

#94. Bradish had never had any occasion to experience self-righteousness other than the self-righteousness of the sinner.

John Cheever

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

John Cheever

#96. Seated at the table, high in her firmament of gin, she looked critically at her brother and his wife, remembering some real or imagined injustice of her youth, for with any proximity the constellations of some families generate among themselves an asperity that nothing can sweeten.

John Cheever

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. ...years of resolute self-denial, instead of rewarding him with reserves of fortitude, had left him more than ordinarily susceptible to temptation.

John Cheever

#100. 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