John Cheever Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  John Cheever

  Summer, Morning, Splendid

  John Cheever, Blake Bailey (2009). “John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings”

  49 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Art, Lying

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Lonely, Loneliness, Being Alone

  1966 Collected in The Journals,'The Sixties'.

  80 Copy quote

• The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.

  John Cheever

  Disappointment, Adults, Culture

  6 Copy quote

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

  John Cheever

  Writing, Kissing, Reader

  Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 1979.

  12 Copy quote

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

  John Cheever

  Fear, Knives, Worry

  TheWapshot Chronicle ch. 36 (1957)

  21 Copy quote

• Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.

  John Cheever

  Country, Time, Long

  33 Copy quote

• I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.

  John Cheever

  Love You, Criticism, Possibility

  8 Copy quote

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

  John Cheever

  Inspirational, Country, Travel

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Love, Rain, Snow

  6 Copy quote

• For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.

  John Cheever

  Rain, Intelligent, Men

  25 Copy quote

• Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman.

  John Cheever

  Blood, Knives, House

  TheWapshot Chronicle ch. 36 (1957)

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Philosophy, Book

  12 Copy quote

• The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.

  John Cheever

  Love, People, Justice

  John Cheever, Blake Bailey (2009). “John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings”

  9 Copy quote

• Art is the triumph over chaos.

  John Cheever

  Art, Triumph, Chaos

  John Cheever (1961). “Some Peoples, Places, and Things that Will Not Appear in My Next Novel”, New York : Harper

  19 Copy quote

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

  John Cheever

  Heart, Self, Sand

  1952 Collected in The Journals,'The Late Forties and Fifties'.

  4 Copy quote

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

  John Cheever

  Speech, Communicate, Bores

  8 Copy quote

• Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.

  John Cheever

  Beautiful, Country, Believe

  John Cheever, Blake Bailey (2009). “John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings”

  16 Copy quote

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

  John Cheever

  Wisdom, Two, Evil

  1956 Collected in The Journals,'The Late Forties and Fifties'.

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Sorry, Fog, Essence

  John Cheever, Blake Bailey (2009). “John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings”

  17 Copy quote

• The short story is the literature of the nomad.

  John Cheever

  Stories, Literature, Short Story

  15 Copy quote

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

  John Cheever

  Kings, Dark, Night

  John Cheever (1958). “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, and Other Stories: By John Cheever”, New York, Harper

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  John Cheever

  Despair, Literature, World

  "Home before Dark". Book by Susan Cheever, 1984.

  13 Copy quote

• The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.

  John Cheever

  Determination, Light, Looks

  John Cheever, Blake Bailey (2009). “John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings”

  3 Copy quote

• To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.

  John Cheever

  Dream, Pain, Writing

  "From the Sixties—I" by John Cheever, www.newyorker.com. January 21, 1991.

  16 Copy quote

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