Quote

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

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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
Fear
Gentle
House
Admire
Love
Straight
Like
Taste
Rusty
World
Courage
Relish
Blood
Knife
Stand
Tastes
Woman
Knives

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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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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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A page of good prose remains invincible.
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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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Art is the triumph over chaos.
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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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That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
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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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Children drown, beautiful women are mangled in automobile accidents, cruise ships founder, and men die lingering deaths in mines and submarines, but you will find none of this in my accounts.
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Fiction is experimentation when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
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Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
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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?
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I was here on earth because I chose to be.
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I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
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The short story is the literature of the nomad.
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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 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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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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There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
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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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