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

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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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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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Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
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A page of good prose remains invincible.
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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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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
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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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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
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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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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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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
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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?
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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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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
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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 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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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
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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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I write to make sense of my life. -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
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Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
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