Art is the triumph over chaos.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

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.

Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.

I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.