The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.

I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.

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.

Families without songs are unhappy families.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.