You live your life at the time you live it -- you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening.

What a phrase that is: 'that explains everything!' I know better than to think anything 'explains everything' today.

I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.

Life," Garp wrote, "is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.

I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.