If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.

The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.

Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.

Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then, in time president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.

These days there's all too much coverage of pesudo-events about extraordinarily inauthentic people doing inauthentic things.

Always stay in with the outs.

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.