What I know is, you have chance in life--of surviving it--if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.

Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

A reader is entitled to believe what he or she believes is consonant with the facts of the book. It is not unusual that readers take away something that is spiritually at variance from what I myself experienced. That's not to say readers make up the book they want. We all have to agree on the facts. But readers bring their histories and all sets of longings. A book will pluck the strings of those longings differently among different readers.

Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married.

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

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.