Someone wanted me to write a profile for ESPN about the commissioner of baseball, and I said, "He's just some suit! Some Republican. No!" I mean if you want me to write about baseball, boxing or football, I'll write about those things because I watch them, I think about them a lot and I like them. But I don't want to write about Barry Bonds.

I went to college to study hospitality. I quickly got out of that and realized that what I liked to do was write.

I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.

At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.

Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren't smart.

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency-a chaos-, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers