John Cheever citations

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

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

“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.”

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

“For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.”

“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.”

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

“I was here on earth because I chose to be.”

“There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm wicked, as you say, and I'm rude and I'm boorish and I discovered, after marrying Mr Scaddon, that I could be all these things and worse and that there would still be plenty of people to lick my boots.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Strange and predatory and truly dangerous, car thieves and muggers—they seem to jeopardize all our cherished concepts, even our self-esteem, our property rights, our powers of love, our laws and pleasures. The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery.”

“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.”

“Art is the triumph over chaos.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.”

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

“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.”

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