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.

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

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

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.

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.

For many years I didn't have health insurance.

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.