Quotes from 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.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

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.

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.

The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs.

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.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

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.

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.

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord.

Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

I will never come back, and if I do there will be nothing left, there will be nothing left but the headstones to record what has happened; there will really be nothing at all.

Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

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

Art is the triumph over chaos.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

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

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

It was at the highest point in the arc of a bridge that I became aware suddenly of the depth and bitterness of my feelings about modern life, and of the profoundness of my yearning for a more vivid, simple, and peaceable world.

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.

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.