Quote

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

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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
Really
Percent
Time
Another
World
Able
Homesickness
People
Find
Homesick
Nothing
Fifty
Country
Havens
Long
Absolutely
Something
Haven

More quotes by John Cheever

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To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
John Cheever
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Falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked. . .The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.
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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 main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
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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.
John Cheever
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Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
John Cheever
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There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.
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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 love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
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It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.
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Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
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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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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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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
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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.
John Cheever
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Art is the triumph over chaos.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
John Cheever