John Cheever Quotes

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

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

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

Art is the triumph over chaos.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The short story is the literature of the nomad.

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

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

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.