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
There isn't a king or a merchant prince in the whole world that I envy, for I always knew I was born to be a child of destiny and that I was never meant to wring my living from detestable, low, degrading, mean and ordinary kinds of business.
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.
The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.
For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.
Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.
You can't expect to communicate with anyone if you're a bore.
The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.
I dream that my face appears on a postage stamp.
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.