John Cheever
John Cheever
John William Cheeverwas an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born, and Italy, especially Rome. He is "now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers of the 20th century." While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth27 May 1912
CountryUnited States of America
The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.
Admite the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the lord.
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.
I love you not for the person you are, but for your possibilities.
People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.
Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly that we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.
Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.
I was here on earth because I chose to be.
I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.