A part of adolescence is feelimg that there's no one else around who's enough like youself to understand you.

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it-perhaps your favorite sentence-to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.

I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.

Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

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.