John Cheever (1912 – 1982)
American novelist and short story writer.
I'm wicked, as you say, and I'm rude and I'm boorish and I discovered, after marrying Mr Scaddon, that I could be all these things and worse and that there would still be plenty of people to lick my boots.
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.
I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two.
Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.
He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately and contented way, as if it contained money and securities.
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.
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.
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.
..for the dead fish was striped like a cat and the sky was striped like the fish and the conch was whorled like an ear and the beach was ribbed like a dog's mouth and the movables in the surf splintered and crashed like the walls of Jericho.
Art is the triumph over chaos.
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.
...your underwear is clean in case you should be hit by a taxicab and have to be undressed by strangers.
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.
Homesickness is nothing … Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.
When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
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.
One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories of his excellence.
When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places. That’s the way I remember them, heading for an exit.