Inspirational Quotes by John Cheever (American Novelist)

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of the sleeping mind.
—John Cheever
Topics: Dreams

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain (and) the noise of battle.
—John Cheever
Topics: Writing

We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.
—John Cheever
Topics: Religion, Churches

The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.
—John Cheever
Topics: Perfection

Homesickness is… absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time… You don’t really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don’t have, or haven’t been able to find.
—John Cheever

A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.
—John Cheever
Topics: Loneliness

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil—not the strength to choose between the two.
—John Cheever
Topics: Wisdom

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.
—John Cheever

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.
—John Cheever
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers

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.
—John Cheever
Topics: Cancer

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

• Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
• John Irving American Novelist
• Raymond Chandler American Novelist
• Louis L’Amour American Novelist
• Philip Roth American Novelist, Short-story Writer
• Richard Wright American Novelist, Short-Story Writer
• John Barth American Novelist
• Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
• John Updike American Author
• Lionel Trilling American Critic