John Cheever

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

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.

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.

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.

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.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.

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.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

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.