John Cheever Quotes

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

..for the dead fish was striped like a cat and the sky was striped like the fish and the conch was whorled like an ear and the beach was ribbed like a dog's mouth and the movables in the surf splintered and crashed like the walls of Jericho.

Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.

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.

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.

One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories of his excellence.

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.

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.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

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.

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.

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

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

...your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers.

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.