Top 25 Quotes by John Cheever of 87 - Page 4

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

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

Way, Exit, Remember

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

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

Writing, Kissing, Done

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

Kings, Children, Mean

John Cheever (1973). “The Wapshot Chronicle”, HarperCollins Publishers

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

John Cheever

Dog, Children, Men

For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.

John Cheever

Civilization, Might, Ruins

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

Now working is terribly painful and I'm still having a fight with the booze. I've enlisted the help of a doctor but it's touch and go. A day for me; a day for the hootch.

John Cheever

Fighting, Doctors, Helping

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

Ignorance, Light, Two

"The Journals of John Cheever" by Robert Gottlieb, 1966.

Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor.

John Cheever

Husband, Dark, Rainy Day

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

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

Men, Organization, Perfection