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Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

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
Fiction
Lying
Bewildering
Art
Stupendous
Dream
Triumph
Around
Celebrate
Like
Chaos
World
Spread
Lies

More quotes by John Cheever

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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
John Cheever
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Art is the triumph over chaos.
John Cheever
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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
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Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
John Cheever
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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
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There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
John Cheever
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The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
John Cheever
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I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
John Cheever
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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
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The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
John Cheever
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Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
John Cheever
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Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman.
John Cheever
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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
John Cheever
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Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
John Cheever
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Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
John Cheever
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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
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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
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How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives [sex], as if-jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts-we were describing the changing of a flat tire?
John Cheever
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To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
John Cheever
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Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked. . .The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.
John Cheever