All John Cheever Quotes
The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.
John Cheever
59% of people like this quote
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
55% of people like this quote
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
John Cheever
54% of people like this quote
Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
John Cheever
53% of people like this quote
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
John Cheever
52% of people like this quote
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John Cheever
52% of people like this quote
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
John Cheever
51% of people like this quote
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.
John Cheever
51% of people like this quote
People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
John Cheever
51% of people like this quote
Homesickness is nothing Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
John Cheever
51% of people like this quote
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
John Cheever
50% of people like this quote
Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.
John Cheever
48% of people like this quote
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
46% of people like this quote
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