...maybe it was better to break a man's leg than to break his heart.

Honestly, I expected to get a cold reception because of my subject matter. But when editors took a look at the story I had to tell, and saw that this was not a parochial story at all, they really warmed to it

Books on horse racing subjects have never done well, and I am told that publishers had come to think of them as the literary version of box office poison

My agent and I put out my proposal one Thursday afternoon in August, 1998. Publishers started bidding immediately, and that process progressed for a few days.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.

I am in an altogether new world now. I can think of nothing more wonderful. It is a real touch of all that heaven means.

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen