The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.
quote by John Cheever
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All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.
quote by John Cheever
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When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.
quote by John Cheever
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People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
quote by John Cheever
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The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.
John Cheever in The Stories of John Cheever (1978)
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Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
quote by John Cheever
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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.
quote by 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.
quote by John Cheever
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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.
quote by John Cheever
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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.
quote by John Cheever
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