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Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.
John Cheever -
The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
John Cheever
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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.
John Cheever -
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
John Cheever -
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.
John Cheever -
At my back I hear the word-'homosexual'-and it seems to split my world in two.... It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.
John Cheever -
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.
John Cheever -
One would never have guessed that the world had such a capacity for genuine grief. The most we can do is exploit our memories of his excellence.
John Cheever
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People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
John Cheever -
I sometimes go back to walk through the ghostly remains of Sutton Place where the rude, new buildings stand squarely in one another’s river views.
John Cheever -
The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.
John Cheever -
When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.
John Cheever