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

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

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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Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
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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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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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The short story is the literature of the nomad.
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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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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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A page of good prose remains invincible.
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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.
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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 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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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
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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.
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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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Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
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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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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.
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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
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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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