I felt a strange tightness coming over me, and I reacted instinctively – for the first time in a long, long while – by slipping my notebook into my belt and reaching down to take off my watch. The first thing to go in a street fight is your watch, and once you’ve lost a few, you develop a certain instinct that lets you know when it’s time to get the thing off your wrist and into a safe pocket.

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.

Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser.

Marathon running, like golf, is a game for players, not winners. That is why Callaway sells golf clubs and Nike sells running shoes. But running is unique in that the world's best racers are on the same course, at the same time, as amateurs, who have as much chance of winning as your average weekend warrior would scoring a touchdown in the NFL.

I don't think that my kind of journalism has ever been universally popular. It's lonely out here.

We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom.