Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

...[I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone...Well, that fact alone is staggering.

It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.

I feel a terrible loss when I (eventually must) complete a work of fiction.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

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?