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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.
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
Somebody
Corn
Death
Signs
Light
Lights
Back
Calls
Love
Bread
Smell
Wrote
Friendship
More quotes by John Cheever
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
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.
John Cheever
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
I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
John Cheever
Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
John Cheever
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
Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
John Cheever
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
John Cheever
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
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
Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.
John Cheever
The short story is the literature of the nomad.
John Cheever
That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
John Cheever
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
John Cheever
I write to make sense of my life. -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
John Cheever
Then it is dark it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.
John Cheever
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John Cheever
I was born into no true class and it was my decision early in life to insinuate myself into the middle class like a spy so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission, and to have taken my disguises too seriously.
John Cheever
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.
John Cheever
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
