It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.

People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.

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

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.

One answer to why public interest in men's tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thugishness about the power-baseline style that's become dominant on the tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime...he's amazingly absent of finesse, with movements that look more like a heavy-metal musician's than an athlete's...what a top PBer really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It's awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty.