John Cheever Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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

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

All things of the sea belong to Venus; pearls and shells and alchemists' gold and kelp and the riggish smell of neap tides, the inshore green, and purple further out and the joy of distances and the roar of falling masonry, all these are hers, but she doesn't come out of the sea for all of us.

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

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

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.

My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.

Who reads short stories? one is asked, and I like to think that they are read by men and women in the dentist's office, waiting to be called to the chair; they are read on transcontinental plane trips instead of watching banal and vulgar films spin out the time between our coasts; they are read by discerning and well-informed men and women who seem to feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us.

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

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings. 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.

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.

There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

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.

Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

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

Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.

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

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

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

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