"Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream."
— John Cheever

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

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

"Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains."
— John Cheever (The Stories of John Cheever)

"Weeding the peony hedge I hear the windfalls in the orchard; hear them strike the ground, hear them strike against branches as they fall to the ground. The immemorial smell of apples, old as the sea. Mary makes jelly. Up from the kitchen, up the stairs and into all the rooms comes the smell of apples."
— John Cheever

"Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream."
— John Cheever

"There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor."
— John Cheever

"Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing."
— John Cheever

"These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat."
— John Cheever

""The world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.""
— John Cheever

"Then it is dark. It is a night when kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains."
— John Cheever

"“These napkins are more holy than righteous,” Mrs. Wapshot said, and most of her conversation at table was made up of just such chestnuts, saws and hoary puns."
— John Cheever (The Wapshot Chronicle)

"I have spent considerable of my leisure time in this past year in the improvement of my mind but I find that much of it has been spent extremely foolish and that walking in the pasture at dusk with virtuous, amiable and genteel young ladies I experience none but swineish passions. I commenced to read Russell’s Modern Europe sometime last summer."
— John Cheever (The Wapshot Chronicle)

"It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, "I drank too much last night." You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. "I drank too much," said Donald Westerhazy. "We all drank too much," said Lucinda Merrill. "It must have been the wine," said Helen Westerhazy. "I drank too much of that claret.""
— John Cheever

""Literature has been our salvation, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.”"
— John Cheever