John Cheever: Quotes about the world

John Cheever was American novelist and short story writer. Explore interesting quotes on world.
John Cheever: 72 quotes1 like

“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.”

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

Entry in his journal before his last public appearance, the ceremony at which he received the National Medal for Literature, quoted by Susan Cheever, Home before Dark Houghton Mifflin (1984).

“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 Sixties, 1966 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

“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

Accepting National Book Award, The Writer (September 1958).

“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.”

John Cheever

On the assassination of John F. Kennedy
The Sixties, 1963 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

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

John Cheever book The Wapshot Chronicle

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)

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

John Cheever

“The Bella Lingua” in The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964).