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.

I believe that writing is an account of the powers of extrication.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

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

Without a reader, I cannot write. It's like a kiss: they cannot be done alone.

The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.