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.

Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he's wrong.

It's very hard right now to be a pro sports fan. The economics of this stuff is abysmal.

Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.

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.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.