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

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The short story is the literature of the nomad.
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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
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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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I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
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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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The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.
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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
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Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
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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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To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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