John Cheever Quotes

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.

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.

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

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.

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

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.

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.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.