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.

Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?

When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

Being wrong about important things is exhausting.

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.

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.