At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.

Why don't I like crowds? I suppose the worst possible thing I could say is that I don't like people, and that crowds are just collections of people. That seems like a very nihilistic way to look at the world.

As more and more people recognize the level of violence involved and the consequences of CTE [chronic traumatic encephelopathy, a degenerative brain disorder], they're obviously going to say "We don't want this to be a part of culture." And they overlook the fact that there's a huge swath of the populace where physicality is still a real common thing.

In some ways, Halloween is much easier for women. They can just dress as sluts, and it's kind of a costume, if they never do any other time.

What's kind of happening is the conflict over football might be a class conflict where there is a percentage of people who have no relationship to physicality and a percentage of the populace who still does.

Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.

If somebody asked for the first draft of something I'd written, it'd probably be pretty close to whatever got published. I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns.