It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life.

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

I wanted us to share the sense that the number of wrong moves far exceeds the number of good moves, to share the frightening instability of the correct decision, to bond in being confounded.

There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.

The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.

I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.

As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.