For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work.

People go to restaurants for so many different reasons. To court a girl, to make some deal. Maybe to talk to some lawyer about how to get an alimony settlement better than they got last week.

The Park Avenue of poodles and polished brass; it is cab country, tip-town, glassville, a window-washer's paradise.

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.

I am a documentarian of what I do.

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.

The reporter wrote with the hope that he would get a by-line in the Times, a testimony to his being alive on that day and all the tomorrows of microfilm