John Cheever Quotes

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

Mixed with the love we hold for our native country is the fact that it is the place where we were ra...

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

I dream that someone in space says to me: So let us rush, then, to see the world. It is shaped like ...

Homesickness is absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the ti...

Farragut's first visitor was his wife. He was raking leaves in yard Y when the PA said that 734-508-...

You might have said that his look was thoughtful until you realized that he was not a thoughtful man...

Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot th...

This shit about being fearless before death ain't got no quality. How could you say you were fearles...

The novel remains for me one of the few forms...where we can describe, step by step, minute by minut...

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the ...

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

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

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

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted r...

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

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power t...

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

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around u...

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

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

Art is the triumph over chaos.

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

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

Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his ow...

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the...

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

Standing in the rain outside the door of Percy’s old house, we seemed bound together not by blood an...

Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd f...

Percy must have perceived, early in her marriage, that her husband’s lechery was compulsive and incu...

A NEW CONQUEST always had a wonderful effect on Charlie. He became overnight generous, understanding...

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

I felt that he was a captive of financial and sentimental commitments, like every other man I know, ...

The image of a cleanly, self-possessed man exploiting his solitude was not easy to come by, but then...