The reason that people in the intellectual community argue that football is dangerous is because there's now a large swath of society that has no relationship to physicality or potential violence.

Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.

If you don't have a job, you don't have a fear of losing it. You fear having to get one.

We are often wrong about the past, but at least with the past you can change your thinking. We can't do that with the future.

It is important to have questionable friends you can trust unconditionally.

I guess it really didn't even dawn on me that you could be a rock critic as a job until I was maybe almost out of college. I knew criticism existed. I read Rolling Stone and Spin. Siskel and Ebert were on television. But I had absolutely no idea how to get that kind of life. And moreover, it didn't interest me that much. I just sort of read normal books growing up. I wasn't that media-conscious. I felt like the one thing I was able to do was to listen to a record and decide whether I liked it.

Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.