John Cheever Quotes

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

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

He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately and contented way, as if it contained money and securities.

He had that spooky bass voice meant to announce that he had entered the kingdom of manhood, but Rosalie knew that he was still outside the gates.

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

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

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.

My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats.

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