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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John Cheever
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John Cheever
Age: 70 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 27
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Diarist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Quincy
Massachusetts
John William Cheever
Need
Needs
Writing
Make
Usefulness
Life
Discover
Comes
Write
Sense
More quotes by John Cheever
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
John Cheever
I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
John Cheever
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.
John Cheever
A page of good prose remains invincible.
John Cheever
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
Then it is dark it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
John Cheever
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
John Cheever
The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
John Cheever
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.
John Cheever
Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
John Cheever
Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
John Cheever
Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
John Cheever
There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
John Cheever
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.
John Cheever
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
John Cheever
That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
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
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.
John Cheever
Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.
John Cheever
