[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.

I mean the people who seriously, seriously play devote their lives to it sort of the way monks do. I mean you don't date, you go to bed at a certain time, you eat certain ways, you practice 10-12 hours a day. And I mean, the difference between practicing three hours a day and practicing 12 hours a day is everything. And I certainly never - I never trained seriously after the age of 16.

America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.

I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.