He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.

As happens with people who love a thing too much, it destroys them. Oscar Wilde said, 'You destroy the thing that you love.' It's the other way around. What you love destroys you.

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

Golf cannot be played in anger, or in any mood of emotiional excess. Half the golf balls struck by amateurs are hit if not in rage surely in bewilderment, or gloom, or in cynicism, or even hysterically - all of those emotional excesses must be contained by the professional. Which is why balance is one of the essential ingredients of golf. Professionals invariably trudge phlegmatically around the course - whatever emotions are seething within - with the grim yet placid and bored look of cowpokes, slack-bodied in their saddles, who have been tending the same herd for two months.

I never understood people who don't have bookshelves.

He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.

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