John Cheever
John Cheever
John William Cheeverwas an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is "now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century." While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth27 May 1912
CountryUnited States of America
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.
There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
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.
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
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.
I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.
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.
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.
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.
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.