John Cheever Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places. That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

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

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

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
I don't work with plots. I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts.

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

John Cheever
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
How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

John Cheever
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.

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

John Cheever
How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives [sex], as if-jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts-we were describing the changing of a flat tire?

John Cheever
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
The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.

John Cheever
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.

John Cheever
It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.

John Cheever
Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts.

John Cheever
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.

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

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

John Cheever
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
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.

John Cheever
I have been attacked by a nuisance of a cancer. My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am bald as an egg.

John Cheever
The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming—Diana and Helen—and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

John Cheever
The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.

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
The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.

John Cheever