Quote

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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John Cheever
Age: 70 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 27
Died: 1982
Died: June 18
Diarist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Quincy
Massachusetts
John William Cheever
Part
Sort
Display
Life
Hand
Element
Chance
Critical
Hoodwinked
Lying
Telling
Sleight
Story
Elements
Displays
Feelings
Lies
Falsehood
Hands
Fiction
Thrill
Stories
Told
Deepest

More quotes by 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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Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
John Cheever
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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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The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
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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The short story is the literature of the nomad.
John Cheever
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It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.
John Cheever
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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.
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.
John Cheever
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I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
John Cheever
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A page of good prose remains invincible.
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.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever
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Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.
John Cheever
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I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
John Cheever
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I write to make sense of my life. -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
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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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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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