John Cheever
I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Destiny
Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.Collection: Writing
The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.Collection: Baseball
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.Collection: Kings
...the sounds next door served as a kind of trip wire: I seemed to stumble and fall on my face, skinning and bruising myself here and there and scattering my emotional and intellectual possessions. There was no point in pretending that I had not fallen, for when we are stretched out in the dirt we must pick ourselves up and brush off our clothes. This then, in a sense, is what I did, reviewing my considered opinions on marriage, constancy, man's nature, and the importance of love. When I had picked up my possessions and repaired my appearance, I fell asleep.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Hands
Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.Collection: World
The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Spiritual
Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.Collection: Pain
The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.Collection: Determination
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.Collection: Cancer
Who reads short stories? one is asked, and I like to think that they are read by men and women in the dentist's office, waiting to be called to the chair; they are read on transcontinental plane trips instead of watching banal and vulgar films spin out the time between our coasts; they are read by discerning and well-informed men and women who seem to feel that narrative fiction can contribute to our understanding of one another and the sometimes bewildering world around us.Collection: Men
I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Elderly
My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.Collection: New York
I was here on earth because I chose to be.Collection: Earth
There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.Collection: Alcohol
For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.Collection: Different
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.Collection: Death
Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.Collection: Hair
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.Collection: Men
How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?Collection: Mean
Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.Collection: Savages
Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked. . .The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Civilization
Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Husband
How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives [sex], as if-jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts-we were describing the changing of a flat tire?Collection: Sex
A page of good prose remains invincible.Collection: Pages
I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.Collection: Energy
At my back I hear the word-"homosexual"-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.Collection: Ignorance
I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake BaileyCollection: Writing
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.Collection: Men
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: Reading