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

Baseball is a team game but, at the same time, it's a very lonely game: unlike in soccer or basketball, where players roam around, in baseball everyone has their little plot of the field to tend. When the action comes to you, the spotlight is on you but no one can help you.

Poetry might be more about the eternal verities, the essence of the human soul, and - although it's reductive to say so - fiction has perhaps been more about the differences between the unconstrained world of the imagination and the realities you run into, day-to-day, when you're riding your donkey.

For many years I didn't have health insurance.

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.

Looking at and shaping your own work is a very intuitive process. You see something you've written in your notebook. It's there on the page and either feels right or it doesn't, and it's hard sometimes to go beyond that and discover why it feels that way.

You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht.