John Cheever Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

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

  John Cheever

  Writing, Kissing, Reader

  Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 1979.

• 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

  Grief, Rain, Writing

  Accepting National Medal for Literature, en.wikiquote.org. April 27, 1982.

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

  John Cheever

  Writing, Fiction, Cease

• 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

  Rain, Taken, Writing

  "The Journals of John Cheever" by Robert Gottlieb, 1963.

• Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.

  John Cheever

  Writing, Kissing, Done

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

  John Cheever

  Writing, Needs, Make Sense

  Accepting Edward MacDowell Medal, September 8, 1979.

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

  John Cheever

  Writing, Ego, Promise

• Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.

  John Cheever

  Writing, Stories, Kind

• To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world.

  John Cheever

  Dream, Pain, Writing

  "From the Sixties—I" by John Cheever, www.newyorker.com. January 21, 1991.

• I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.

  John Cheever

  Believe, Writing, I Believe

• I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

  John Cheever

  Writing, Blake, Make Sense

• 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

  Writing, Nuclear, Roles

  "Home before Dark". Book by Susan Cheever, 1984.

• The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.

  John Cheever

  Children, Philosophy, Book

• Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can't write a story.

  John Cheever

  Writing, Battle, Fiction

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