It is the secret life that sustains me now, and as I reach the top of that bridge I say it in a whisper, I say it as a prayer, as regret, and as praise. I can't tell you why I do it or what it means, but each night when I drive toward my southern home and my southern life, I whisper these words: 'Lowenstein, Lowenstein.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.