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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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John Cheever
Age: 70 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 27
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Diarist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Quincy
Massachusetts
John William Cheever
Play
Competing
Feels
Double
Would
Series
Men
Baseball
World
Appreciate
Poet
Finesse
Reader
Superb
Lost
Storyteller

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
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The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
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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.
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Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
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To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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 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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I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
John Cheever
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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
John Cheever