This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

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.

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.

Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.