Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Cheever
Age: 70 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 27
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Diarist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Quincy
Massachusetts
John William Cheever
Filled
Bald
However
Cleaners
Week
Carpet
Around
Veins
Stills
Cats
Still
Eggs
Neapolitan
Mean
Cat
Distilled
Cancer
Cleaner

More quotes by John Cheever

Image
I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
John Cheever
Image
Homesickness is . . . absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. . . . You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.
John Cheever
Image
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.
John Cheever
Image
A page of good prose remains invincible.
John Cheever
Image
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
John Cheever
Image
The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
John Cheever
Image
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
Image
I write to make sense of my life. -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
John Cheever
Image
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.
John Cheever
Image
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.
John Cheever
Image
I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
John Cheever
Image
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John Cheever
Image
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
Image
Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
Image
Then it is dark it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
John Cheever
Image
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.
John Cheever
Image
The short story is the literature of the nomad.
John Cheever
Image
To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
John Cheever
Image
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.
John Cheever
Image
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
John Cheever