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.
– John Cheever
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.
– John Cheever
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
– John Cheever
Art is the triumph over chaos.
– John Cheever
Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.
– John Cheever
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.
– John Cheever
He had that spooky bass voice meant to announce that he had entered the kingdom of manhood, but Rosalie knew that he was still outside the gates.
– John Cheever
He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately and contented way, as if it contained money and securities.
– John Cheever
Homesickness is nothing Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
– John Cheever
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss-you can't do it alone.
– John Cheever
I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
– John Cheever
I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another's river views.
– John Cheever
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
– John Cheever
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.
– John Cheever
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.
– John Cheever
That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
– John Cheever
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
– John Cheever
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
– John Cheever
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
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.
– John Cheever
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.
– John Cheever
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
– John Cheever
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
– John Cheever
Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.