Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.

The message of "The Winner Takes It All" is straightforward: It argues that the concept of relationships ending on mutual terms is an emotional fallacy. One person is inevitably okay and the other is inevitably devastated.

In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.

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.

And it's kind of my own fault too, in the sense that I've used my own life as a literary device so much. I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. I find that most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen.

And I spilled gravy on my Carolina sweater, because I am alive.

My mind and gut are never simpatico: Every time I think somebody likes me, she doesn't; every time I think somebody doesn't like me, she does. This has never changed and I'm certain it never will.