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

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

If you're part of any kind of writerly community, some of those people will have gone through MFA programs, and their thinking leaks into yours. So whatever changes MFAs have made to the culture, it's to the culture as a whole. It can't be pinned down to individual books in a way that some people would like to do.

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

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.

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

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.