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Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

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
Good
Ego
Things
Excellent
Writers
Promise
Hundred
Greater
Latitude
Often
Bedtime
Writing
Promises

More quotes by John Cheever

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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
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There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
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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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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
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Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
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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.
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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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A page of good prose remains invincible.
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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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To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
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The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us.
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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John Cheever
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Then it is dark it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
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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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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.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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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.
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