171 Quotes by John Cheever

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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