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The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.

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
Main
Adults
Advantage
Wealth
Emotion
Education
Advantages
American
Adult
Culture
Disappointment

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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
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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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Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to reognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia at all.
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Art is the triumph over chaos.
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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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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
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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.
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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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To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
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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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I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
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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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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
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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.
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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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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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Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
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Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
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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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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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