In New York the Fifth Avenue Lingerie Shop is on Madison Avenue, the Madison Pet Shop is on Lexington Avenue, the Park Avenue Florist is on Madison Avenue, and the Lexington Hand Laundry is on Third Avenue. New York is the home of 120 pawnbrokers, and it is where Bishop Sheen’s brother, Dr. Sheen, shares an office with one Dr. Bishop.

The reporter wrote with the hope that he would get a by-line in the Times, a testimony to his being alive on that day and all the tomorrows of microfilm.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work.

One way to hold a woman is not to hold her.

They were unabashed voyeurs looking at him; and Talese looked back.

I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.

I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.

Gerald Foos’s explanation in his journal – he was ‘only an observer and not a reporter,’ and he ‘really didn’t exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned’ – were explanations that didn’t surprise me because of his often-expressed notion that he was a fractured individual, a hybridized combination of the Voyeur and Gerald Foos.

And so there is nothing new in Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Nor is there anything old.