Maybe it's a tired tale, but without an education, you're not going to go anywhere.

Why did I become a writer? Because I grew up in New York City, and there were seven newspapers in New York City, and my family was an inveterate reader of newspapers and I loved holding a paper in my hand. It was something sacred.

My grandmother got her law degree from Syracuse University in roughly 1911 and later co-founded with her husband an investment banking firm on Wall Street known as Lebenthal & Co.

Athletics: it's a wonderful thing, it's a spell-binding thing, nothing in life has quite as much pageantry, as much emotion within a finite time frame, it's incredibly exciting.

I worked at my high school newspaper at Andover, which came out weekly, unusual for a high school paper. Then my first day at Penn I went right to the 'Daily Pennsylvanian' and pretty much spent most of my college career working both as the sports editor and then editor of the editorial page.

I actually like football a great deal.

I always had a curiosity about Texas. I had a curiosity about small-town life, although, granted, Odessa's not a tiny town.