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.

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

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 writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.

The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.

A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, "I don't know what he's doing."

It was strange the way he loved her; a side long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention.