The Short Story Is The Literature Of

To Be An American And Unable To Play Baseball Is Comparable To Being A Polynesian And Unable To Swim.

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.

To Disguise Nothing, To Conceal Nothing, To Write About Those Things That Are Closest To Our Pain, Our Happiness; To Write About Our Sexual Clumsiness, The Agonies Of Tantalus, The Depth Of Our Discouragement-what We Glimpse In Our Dreams-our Despair. To Write About The Foolish Agonies Of Anxiety, The Refreshment Of Our Strength When These Are Ended; To Write About Our Painful Search For Self, Jeopardized By A Stranger In The Post Office, A Half-seen Face In A Train Window, To Write About The Continents And Populations Of Our Dreams, About Love And Death, Good And Evil, The End Of The World.

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.

The Deep Joy We Take In The Company Of People With Whom We Have Just Recently Fallen In Love Is Undisguisable.