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
Cancer
Cleaner
Filled
Bald
However
Cleaners
Week
Carpet
Around
Veins
Cats
Stills
Eggs
Neapolitan
Still
Cat
Distilled
Mean

More quotes by John Cheever

Image
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.
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
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.
John Cheever
Image
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
John Cheever
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
John Cheever
Image
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.
John Cheever
Image
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
Image
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
John Cheever
Image
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
John Cheever
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
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
I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
John Cheever
Image
Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
Image
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.
John Cheever
Image
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
John Cheever
Image
Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
John Cheever