“The short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant.”

We are at war and I am on a train leaving for the country.

I am troubled because I suspect it might be better to spend the war in the city.

Out the window I see soldiers cooking lunch in kitchen sinks and other unlikely containers.

Mr. Bean and Mr. Muller were in the Coffee Cup sharing a grinder when the notion came to Mr. Bean to paint a lion. He got up at once without excusing himself and went to the hardware store 

In the beginning there was Ben, just Ben alone before Laura or Landis or the Spaniard, but before Ben there had been others living where Ben was to live. Living, cooking, eating, and burning lights in the middle of the night and descending and ascending the stairs and coming and going and taking their keys and putting them back again and paying their bills or not paying them and being quiet or noisy and predictable and erratic and walking the roof in spring.

If it looked like a good long rain, Jan would set the basket inside the door and fly back out and down to the summerhouse under the big splashing drops before anyone had time to say come back or take your sweater

No, no, said Miss Etta, putting three loops and a scallop to centre front, no no no, said Miss Etta, crossing behind and slipping two, no no, don’t tell me she didm’t mean it. Don't try to tell me she didn’t mean it, because I know she did, and she began the second row.

I like cats as far as creatures go. I like almost any animal that does not have horns or scales on it for that matter, but I especially like cats. Any sort and denomination: spotted or solid, fat or thin, with and without fleas. I like them and admire them and almost anything they do is a pleasure to me.

 

The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century. 

A little house. Abandoned. Rank with grasses. We must have passed it by a dozen times before we knew it was the place, so undistinguished it was, looking for all the world like any peasant cottage, squatting on its haunches behind a wooden gate closed up to stay with ivy and trumpet vine, mixed impartially in the business of regaining possession.