"You make it sound so easy." But that was one of the wonderful things about Sterling Nelson: he could make any difficult thing sound easy, and the on… - Richard Yates

Oh, Colby said. I see. What d'you see? You really aren't much of a conversationalist, you know that? You 'see', What can you possibly 'see' from what little I've told you?

"Okay, kid," Walker said, "This is it." And it was the absurdity of the phrase - nobody said "This is it" except in the movies, unless they were phoney bastards like Loomis - that roused Prentice to his first real anger of the morning. He wanted to smash and break the head of anyone stupid enough to say a thing like that; he wanted to kill all the posturing fraudulence in the world, and it was all here before him in this big, dumb, bobbing face.

But it was the work that ultimately mattered, and for Yates 'The Great Gatsby' was holy writ. Encountering the novel for the first time was, quite simply, the definite milestone of his apprenticeship: Gatsby, Yates declared, was "his formal introduction to the craft." Echoes of Salingerian diction are especially audible in Yates's early work, and linger faintly in his mature style, the result of his reading over and over his five favorite stories in 'Nine Stories'.