John cheever

Literary Birthday – 27 May – John Cheever

John Cheever was born 27 May 1912, and died 18 June 1982.

Quotes

  1. I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.
  2. 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.
  3. Art is the triumph over chaos.
  4. I’ve been homesick for countries I’ve never been, and longed to be where I couldn’t be.
  5. The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.
  6. 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.
  7. Fiction is experimentation. When it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.
  8. People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
  9. Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics.
  10. Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
  11. The secret of keeping young is to read children’s books.
  12. A page of good prose remains invincible.

John Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer. Although he is best remembered for his short stories, he also wrote four novels, including The Wapshot Chronicle. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johncheever.jpg

Image courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar

Posted on: 27th May 2014
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