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

I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.

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.

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.

I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.

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

It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.