The Time of Friendship is a collection of 13 works of short fiction by Paul Bowles published in 1967 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

"[6] Literary critic Maureen Howard writes: Reading The Time of Friendship, Paul Bowles's … collection of stories, I was aware of a career honest in its aims but only occasionally swinging free of a steady performance….

The existential experience of The Sheltering Sky can never seem dated, but many of the empty exotic scenes in The Time of Friendship depend upon a bleak modernity which has worn thin even for Bowles.

"[7] Literary critic Daniel Stern writes: Paul Bowles's universe (and it is a mark of distinction that there is a Bowlesian universe) is made up of primitive but wise natives and effete children of the West searching for escape from the self—that self that supposedly hangs like an albatross around the neck of modern literature, from Hemingway to Herzog, feeding thought and stifling feeling.

His characters, robbed of purpose, their spirits rubbed flat, move zombielike through exquisitely desolate landscapes—Moroccan ghettos, Algerian deserts, New York subway tunnels.

Living in Africa, corresponding with America in a kind of code, he uses the same metaphors of loneliness and abandon that signaled his leap from music to the novel with The Sheltering Sky in 1949.