John Cheever Quotes about Writing

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story.

What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.

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

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