Quote

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

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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
Looks
Lays
Anonymous
Number
Drunkenness
Drink
Telephone
Numbers
Alcoholics
Open
Whiskey
Whatever
Telephones
Hands
Shaking
Leftover
Look
Bars
Gin

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There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
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We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.
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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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Art is the triumph over chaos.
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Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
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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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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
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A page of good prose remains invincible.
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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 can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
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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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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
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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.
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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 novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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