“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

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewilderin…" by John Cheever?

John Cheever 36

American novelist and short story writer 1912–1982

Related quotes

“Art is the triumph over chaos.”

John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer

The Stories of John Cheever Knopf (1978).

“Almost everything in the pop culture lexicon of vampirism is basically fiction—and fiction is the art of telling entertaining lies for money.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 9, “Committee Processes” (p. 159)

“Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.”

Stephen Sondheim (1930) American composer and lyricist

“For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.”

C. J. Cherryh book Visible Light

The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh (2004) – from the introduction to "Visible Light"

“I happen to believe that most of the important things in the material world start out as fiction. That everything around us was once fiction – before there was the table there was the idea of a table, and the idea of a table before tables was fiction. This is the most important world, the world of fictional things. That’s the world where all this starts.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: A god is the idea of a god. The idea of a god is a god. The idea of Glycon is Glycon, if I can enhance that idea with an anaconda and a speaking tube, fair enough. I am unlikely to start believing that this glove puppet created the universe. It’s a fiction, all gods are fiction. It’s just that I happen to think that fiction’s real. Or that it has its own reality, that is just as valid as ours. I happen to believe that most of the important things in the material world start out as fiction. That everything around us was once fiction – before there was the table there was the idea of a table, and the idea of a table before tables was fiction. This is the most important world, the world of fictional things. That’s the world where all this starts.

“Over the ships that are anchored,
Over the fleets that part,
Over the cities dark by the shore,
High as a dream thou art!”

Louise Imogen Guiney (1861–1920) American writer

The Sea-Gull

“The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1970) " Notes On Structured Programming http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD249.PDF" (EWD249), Section 3 ("On The Reliability of Mechanisms"), p. 7.
1970s