I work out four days a week in the off-season, and in the warm, running weather months, I do five days. A push/pull regime of weightlifting, cycling, and the occasional Saturday or Sunday run with my oldest son, even if it's cold out.

Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.

I was always a sensitive, sweet kid, but I got brutalized and I became brutal. And frankly, I don't think it was my natural makeup. I don't think its anyone's natural makeup to be a violent brawler.

We are all living this dance and it is clearly fraught with making choices. Lots of my choices are bad and that's normal. None of us are attractive at all times. What is attractive to me is authenticity.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It's an honest descent into darkness. And you can't have the joy without the grief - it's why we listen to Mozart's 'Requiem.'

Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere.