Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?

I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.