John Cheever
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.Collection: Knowledge
Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.Collection: Knowledge
Art is the triumph over chaos.Collection: Art
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.Collection: Alone
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.Collection: Love
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.Collection: Family
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.Collection: Morning
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.Collection: Home
Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Beauty
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.Collection: Communication
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
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.
That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
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.
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.
I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
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.Collection: 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.Collection: Lonely
The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.Collection: Disappointment
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.Collection: Country
I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.Collection: Love You
I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.Collection: Inspirational
I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Rain
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.Collection: Blood
The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.Collection: Children
You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.Collection: Speech
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.Collection: Beautiful
The short story is the literature of the nomad.Collection: Stories
If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.Collection: Sorry
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.Collection: Wisdom
When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.Collection: Heart
Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.Collection: Kings
To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Views
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.Collection: Beautiful
Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to reognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia at all.Collection: Friendship
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.Collection: Night
It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.Collection: Friendship
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.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Art
Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.Collection: Writing
To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.Collection: Softball
I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.Collection: Taken
Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.Collection: Goes On