Quote

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

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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
Hats
World
Times
Filled
Store
Lost
York
Stories
City
Corner
Stationery
Light
Seem
River
Benny
Stills
Cities
Stores
Goodman
Seems
Heard
Corners
Quartets
Still
Everybody
Rivers
Wore
Long
Almost
Radio

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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.
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The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.
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The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.
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The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.
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At my back I hear the word-homosexual-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.
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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
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Art is the triumph over chaos.
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There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
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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.
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The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
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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.
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Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
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Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
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