Quote

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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John Cheever
Age: 70 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 27
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Diarist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Quincy
Massachusetts
John William Cheever
Stand
Rude
Another
River
Place
Rivers
Back
Remains
Sometimes
Walk
Sutton
Building
Squarely
Walks
Ghostly
Views
Buildings

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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 can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
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Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
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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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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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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
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My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.
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