Heat radiated off Henry's face. Salty snot ran down his upper lip. A majestic fart propelled him to the top of Section 12, just at the springing of the stadium's curve. He slapped the sign as if high-fiving a teammate. It gave back a game shudder. He was crusing now, darkness be damned, stripping off his sweatshirt and his long underwear top without breaking stride.

Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.

Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.

... people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.

Getting your foot in the door with some publishing people can be important when you're starting out as a writer, but it's also not enough to get you where you need to be.

Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.

A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, "I don't know what he's doing."