Art Is The Triumph Over Chaos.

Children Drown, Beautiful Women Are Mangled In Automobile Accidents, Cruise Ships Founder, And Men Die Lingering Deaths In Mines And Submarines, But You Will Find None Of This In My Accounts.

My God, The Suburbs! They Encircled The City's Boundaries Like Enemy Territory And We Thought Of Them As A Loss Of Privacy, A Cesspool Of Conformity And A Life Of Indescribable Dreariness In Some Split-level Village Where The Place Name Appeared In The New York Times Only When Some Bored Housewife Blew Off Her Head With A Shotgun.

The Task Of An American Writer Is Not To Describe The Misgivings Of A Woman Taken In Adultery As She Looks Out Of A Window At The Rain But To Describe Four Hundred People Under The Lights Reaching For A Foul Ball. This Is Ceremony.

Homesickness Is . . . Absolutely Nothing. Fifty Percent Of The People In The World Are Homesick All The Time. . . . You Don't Really Long For Another Country. You Long For Something In Yourself That You Don't Have, Or Haven't Been Able To Find.

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.