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.

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.

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.

I tended to write the book in these bursts of two or three months at a time. So I would know, or at least feel securely, that for the next few months I was at least going to have a few hours a day.

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

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.