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 More Quotes by John Cheever More Quotes From 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 elderly fishing sea 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. John Cheever rain snow love 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 different body lovers Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego. John Cheever ego writing promise All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life. John Cheever yankees fans men 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 taken rain writing Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two. John Cheever wisdom evil two The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness. John Cheever make-sense writing needs 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 records struggle men I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone. John Cheever kissing reader writing There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor. John Cheever metaphor terrible alcohol Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction. John Cheever cease writing fiction 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. John Cheever taken decision class The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment. John Cheever adults disappointment culture All things of the sea belong to Venus; pearls and John Cheever distance sea fall 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 rude views rivers 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. John Cheever exaltation athletic friendship The short story is the literature of the nomad. John Cheever short-story literature stories 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 grief rain writing 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. John Cheever office men thinking
