John Cheever quotes

John Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer, often called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His works explored the complexities of American middle-class life, combining realism with subtle irony. He is celebrated for his vivid storytelling and profound insight into human nature. Here are 46 of his quotes:

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

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

John Cheever

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

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.

John Cheever

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

John Cheever

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

John Cheever

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

John Cheever

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss-you can't do it alone.

John Cheever

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

...your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers.

John Cheever

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.

John Cheever

He had that spooky bass voice meant to announce that he had entered the kingdom of manhood, but Rosalie knew that he was still outside the gates.

John Cheever

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.

John Cheever

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.

John Cheever

We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.

John Cheever

The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.

John Cheever

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

John Cheever

I was here on earth because I chose to be.

John Cheever

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

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

John Cheever

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. 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

I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another's river views.

John Cheever