You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore. John Cheever More Quotes by John Cheever More Quotes From John Cheever 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. John Cheever light cities new-york Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write. John Cheever kind stories writing Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics. John Cheever dog men children 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. John Cheever cities new-york loss 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. John Cheever rainy-day husband dark 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. John Cheever longing records men Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two. John Cheever good strength wisdom knowledge