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I was here on earth because I chose to be.

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
Chose
Earth

More quotes by John Cheever

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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.
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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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.
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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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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I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.
John Cheever
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There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.
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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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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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
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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
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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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A page of good prose remains invincible.
John Cheever
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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
John Cheever
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It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.
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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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
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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
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Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts.
John Cheever
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All things of the sea belong to Venus pearls and shells and alchemists' gold and kelp and the riggish smell of neap tides, the inshore green, and purple further out and the joy of distances and the roar of falling masonry, all these are hers, but she doesn't come out of the sea for all of us.
John Cheever