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Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.

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
Stories
Sometimes
Writing
Kind
Seeming
Easiest
Hardest
Reader
Write

More quotes by John Cheever

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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.
John Cheever
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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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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.
John Cheever
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A page of good prose remains invincible.
John Cheever
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For these are not as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization, but are temporary encampment and outposts of the civilization that we - you and I - shall build.
John Cheever
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Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.
John Cheever
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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
John Cheever
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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
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The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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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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Art is the triumph over chaos.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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The short story is the literature of the nomad.
John Cheever
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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
John Cheever
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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
John Cheever
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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John Cheever