Princeton is quite integrated. Women are professors at Princeton. Women are students at Princeton. That began in the 1970s.

In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not.

Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.