Rick Bass is one of the best writers of his generation.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else.

I remember being awed by it - the uniqueness and nicety of style - and I suspect I was a bit jealous because we were more or less of the same generation.

You do not cut a check in the state of Kansas to John Doe, executioner. The executioner is paid in cash so there's no trail to him

The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book.

At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact.