The way in which sports focuses more on the peccadilloes, lives and putative personalities of athletes and less on the finer points of playing games, I've become less interested in it. I don't want to write sports profiles.

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.

Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that

I realized I loved you, and I didn't want to be married to somebody I didn't love. I wanted to be married to you. It isn't all that complicated.

You can't always go to the well and have things be funny.

My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.

Even though I get a lot done with my solitude, and I make the best use of it possible, I always think solitude is an interlude in a period of time, which is populated by others.