Quotes from John Cheever

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

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 our salvation, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.

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

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

She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

Homesickness is absolutely nothing," she said angrily. "It is absolutely nothing. Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. But I don't suppose you're old enough to understand. When you're in one place and long to be in another, it isn't as simple as taking a boat. You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.

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

Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

Long ago when they first invented the atomic bomb people used to worry about its going off and killing everybody, but they didn't know that mankind has enough dynamite right in his guts to tear the fucking plant to pieces.

A page of good prose remains invincible.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly that we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.

The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.

It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, "I drank too much last night.

Homesickness is absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.