Quote

How can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives [sex], as if-jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts-we were describing the changing of a flat tire?

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
Experience
Flat
Flats
Nuts
Wrench
Describe
Wrenches
Changing
Exalted
Physical
Describing
Sex
Tire
Lives
Jack

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
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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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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.
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Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
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.
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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.
John Cheever
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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.
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Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
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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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