"Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego"
About this Quote
Cheever’s line lands like a sly confession dressed up as craft advice: writing isn’t just a skill, it’s a permission slip. Plenty of talented people can sing, cook, charm a room, fix an engine, raise a family. Those pursuits can still be judged by external standards - the meal either works, the engine either starts. Writing, Cheever suggests, offers a different kind of stage: a private kingdom where the self gets unusually broad sovereignty.
The intent isn’t to flatter writers; it’s to unmask them. “Latitude for the ego” is doing the heavy lifting. A page will tolerate your obsession, your revisions of history, your petty vendettas, your secret tenderness. It lets you curate reality while claiming you’re only “telling a story.” That’s the subtext: the writer’s authority is culturally sanctioned narcissism, refined into sentences. Even “good writers” - the ones we pretend are purely disciplined artisans - may be pulled by the seductive idea that their inner weather deserves to become public climate.
Context matters with Cheever, a chronicler of American respectability shot through with adultery, alcoholism, and the ache of being split in two. His suburban characters perform normalcy while hoarding private appetites; the writer is simply the most efficient version of that double life. The quote also pokes at the mid-century literary myth of the serious author as moral witness. Cheever doesn’t deny seriousness, but he points to the psychic payoff beneath it: writing offers the freedom to enlarge the self, then call it art.
The intent isn’t to flatter writers; it’s to unmask them. “Latitude for the ego” is doing the heavy lifting. A page will tolerate your obsession, your revisions of history, your petty vendettas, your secret tenderness. It lets you curate reality while claiming you’re only “telling a story.” That’s the subtext: the writer’s authority is culturally sanctioned narcissism, refined into sentences. Even “good writers” - the ones we pretend are purely disciplined artisans - may be pulled by the seductive idea that their inner weather deserves to become public climate.
Context matters with Cheever, a chronicler of American respectability shot through with adultery, alcoholism, and the ache of being split in two. His suburban characters perform normalcy while hoarding private appetites; the writer is simply the most efficient version of that double life. The quote also pokes at the mid-century literary myth of the serious author as moral witness. Cheever doesn’t deny seriousness, but he points to the psychic payoff beneath it: writing offers the freedom to enlarge the self, then call it art.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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