I think that it is very interesting to write about a team because a team is a group of people who work in very close quarters and have very intense relationships so - in my days of playing sports, I was very rarely on a team that did not have it's own peculiar dynamic, and you wind up having very intense feelings for good and for bad about these people with whom you spend many hours a day.

For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day.

There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.

The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.

To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.

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

I'm just kind of really interested in athletes as artists of a pretty serious variety and people who devote themselves to what they do in a really incredible way.