Literary Birthday – 27 May – John Cheever

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

John Cheever 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. His work describes, often through fantasy and ironic comedy, the life, manners, and morals of middle-class suburban America. Although he is best remembered for his short stories, he also wrote four novels, including The Wapshot Chronicle, which earned him the National Book Award. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Source for Image: Image courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johncheever.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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