Quotes by John Cheever

• Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
• The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
• That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.
• People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
• 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.
• It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
• I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
• The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
• 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.
• All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
• When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
• Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
• Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
• 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.
• Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.
• 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.
• Art is the triumph over chaos.
• Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.
• I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.
• Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.