John Cheever Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

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.

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

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

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.

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

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.

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

The short story is the literature of the nomad.

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

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