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.

Never eat a heavily sugared doughnut before you go on TV.

The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

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.

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship.