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.

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 write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.

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

Journalism is a voyeuristic vocation that attracts to its employment many people who are often naturally shy and insatiably curious, and each day they are assigned to view the world with a critical eye and a detached sense of intimacy.

Wall Street bankers supposedly back the Yankees; Smith College girls approve of them. God, Brooks Brothers, and United States Steel are believed to be solidly in the Yankees' corner... The efficiently triumphant Yankee maching is a great institution, but, as they say, who can fall in love with U.S. Steel?

Thirteen years I took on this last book.