Top 100 John Cheever Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “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

52. “I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.”

— John Cheever

53. “There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between one and two – a spiritual no-man’s-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments, and ratholes we all share, disarmed by the gullibility of our hearts.”

— John Cheever

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

— John Cheever

55. “I was here on earth because I chose to be.”

— John Cheever

56. “Adultery and cruelty have well-marked courses of action but what can a man do when his wife wants to appear naked on the stage?”

— John Cheever

57. “Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.”

— John Cheever

58. “For Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues.”

— John Cheever

59. “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.”

— John Cheever

60. “There isn’t a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.”

— John Cheever

61. “I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.”

— John Cheever

62. “For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we – you and I – shall build.”

— John Cheever

63. “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.”

— John Cheever

64. “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.”

— John Cheever

65. “Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.”

— John Cheever

66. “Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor.”

— John Cheever

67. “But now that she had made him her confidant, he saw that he could not change this relationship.”

— John Cheever

68. “Trace listened to the story, but how could he get excited? Francis had no powers that would let him re-create a brush with death – particularly in the atmosphere of a commuting train, journeying through a sunny countryside where already, in the slum gardens, there were signs of harvest.”

— John Cheever

69. “The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.”

— John Cheever

70. “I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.”

— John Cheever

71. “I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.”

— John Cheever

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

— John Cheever

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

— John Cheever

74. “The music came through clearly. The new instrument had a much purer tone, she thought, than the old one. She decided that tone was most important and that she could conceal the cabinet behind a sofa. But as soon as she had made her peace with the radio, the interference began.”

— John Cheever

75. “Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can’t write a story.”

— John Cheever

76. “As I approach my fortieth birthday without having accomplished any one of the things I intended to accomplish – without ever having achieved the deep creativity that I have worked toward for all this time – I feel that I take a minor, an obscure, a dim position that is not my destiny but that is my fault, as if I had lacked, somewhere along the line, the wit and courage to contain myself competently within the shapes at hand.”

— John Cheever

77. “Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth.”

— John Cheever

78. “A collection of short stories is generally thought to be a horrendous clinker; an enforced courtesy for the elderly writer who wants to display the trophies of his youth, along with his trout flies.”

— John Cheever

79. “Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.”

— John Cheever

80. “Justina’s life had been exemplary, but by ending it she seemed to have disgraced us all.”

— John Cheever

81. “I am like a prisoner who is trying to escape from jail by the wrong route. For all one knows, that door may stand open, although I continue to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon.”

— John Cheever

82. “The voices woke Amy, and, lying in her bed, she perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how crude and frail it was, like a piece of worn burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness, and when you pointed it out to them, they were indignant.”

— John Cheever

83. “I don’t like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.”

— John Cheever

84. “These napkins are more holy than righteous,” Mrs. Wapshot said, and most of her conversation at table was made up of just such chestnuts, saws and hoary puns.”

— John Cheever

85. “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.”

— John Cheever

86. “The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.”

— John Cheever

87. “Each year, we rent a house at the edge of the sea and drive there in the first of the summer – with the dog and cat, the children, and the cook – arriving at a strange place a little before dark. The journey to the sea has its ceremonious excitements, it has gone on for so many years now, and there is the sense that we are, as in our dreams we have always known ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers – travelers, at least, with a traveler’s acuteness of feeling.” – from ““The Seaside Houses.”

— John Cheever

88. “Mixed with the love we hold for our native country is the fact that it is the place where we were raised, and, should anything have gone a little wrong in this process, we will be reminded of this fault, by the scene of the crime, until the day we die.”

— John Cheever

89. “Now working is terribly painful and I’m still having a fight with the booze. I’ve enlisted the help of a doctor but it’s touch and go. A day for me; a day for the hootch.”

— John Cheever

90. “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

91. “Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.”

— John Cheever

92. “He saw the role of the serious writer as both lofty and practical in the same instant. He used to say that literature was one of the first indications of civilization. He used to say that a fine piece of prose could not only cure a depression, it could clear up a sinus headache. Like many great healers, he meant to heal himself.”

— John Cheever

93. “Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts.”

— John Cheever

94. “The novel remains for me one of the few forms... where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.”

— John Cheever

95. “The landings were dirty and the walls were bare. This stairway brought me into the balcony, and I sat there in the dark, thinking that nothing now was going to save me, that no pretty girl with new shoes was going to cross my path in time.”

— John Cheever

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

— John Cheever

97. “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.”

— John Cheever

98. “It was still mild when they walked home from the party, and Irene looked up at the spring stars. “How far that little candle throws its beams,” she exclaimed. “So shines a good dead in a naughty world.”

— John Cheever

99. “I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.”

— John Cheever

100. “The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.”

— John Cheever