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
Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story.
Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.
I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.
What I am going to write is the last of what I have to say. I will say that literature is the only consciousness we possess and that its role as consciousness must inform us of our ability to comprehend the hideous danger of nuclear power.
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.
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.
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.
Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
Strange and predatory and truly dangerous, car thieves and muggers -- they seem to jeopardize all our cherished concepts, even our self-esteem, our property rights, our powers of love, our laws and pleasures. The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery.