The Fear Of Death Is

Now Working Is Terribly Painful And I'm Still Having A Fight With The Booze. I've Enlisted The Help Of A Doctor But It's Touch And Go. A Day For Me; A Day For The Hootch.

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

The Novel Remains For Me One Of The Few Forms Where We Can Record Man's Complexity And The Strength And Decency Of His Longings.

Fiction Is Art And Art Is The Triumph Over Chaos (no Less) And We Can Accomplish This Only By The Most Vigilant Exercise Of Choice, But In A World That Changes More Swiftly That We Can Perceive There Is Always The Danger That Our Powers Of Selection Will Be Mistaken And That The Vision We Serve Will Come To Nothing.

Who Reads Short Stories? One Is Asked, And I Like To Think That They Are Read By Men And Women In The Dentist's Office, Waiting To Be Called To The Chair; They Are Read On Transcontinental Plane Trips Instead Of Watching Banal And Vulgar Films Spin Out The Time Between Our Coasts; They Are Read By Discerning And Well-informed Men And Women Who Seem To Feel That Narrative Fiction Can Contribute To Our Understanding Of One Another And The Sometimes Bewildering World Around Us.