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The short story is the literature of the nomad.

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
Short
Literature
Story
Stories
Nomad

More quotes by John Cheever

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A page of good prose remains invincible.
John Cheever
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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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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
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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
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Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
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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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The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
John Cheever
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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
John Cheever
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We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.
John Cheever
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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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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
John Cheever
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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
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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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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
John Cheever
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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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Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
John Cheever
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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
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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.
John Cheever