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

My favorite sports novel is End Zone by Delillo. It's such a great looking book too, the black cover with the football player on it. It's just a fantastic little book.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

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.

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

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.