171 Quotes by John Cheever

The belief that a crooked heart is betrayed by palsies, tics, and other infirmities dies hard.

Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

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.

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

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