Unlike the millions who casually masturbate in solitude while looking at girlie pictures in Playboy and similar magazines, the massage man preferred an accomplice, an attendant lady of respectable appearance who would help him reduce the guilt and loneliness of this most lonely act of love.

I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.

Sports is about people who lose and lose and lose. They lose games; then they lose their jobs. It can be very intriguing.

Even after they had stopped modeling for Playboy and had settled down with other men to raise families of their own, Hugh Hefner still considered them his women, and in the bound volumes of his magazine he would always possess them.

Most journalists are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places. . . . gloom is their game, the spectacle their passion, normality their nemesis.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

Putting on a beautifully designed suit elevates my spirit, extols my sense of self, and helps define me as a man to whom details matter.