If sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.

Until you can become accountable to yourself and only yourself, you're probably not going to live a fully vital life. So much of literature is about accountability. The moral issues in most novels are about people becoming responsible for their own behaviour. One of the forces against being responsible for your own behaviour is the force of the past, in the way that the past tries to form you.

I don't have a very logical and orderly mind.

The thing about being a writer is that you never have to ask, 'Am I doing something that's worthwhile?' Because even if you fail at it, you know that it's worth doing.

It is right that you have to have a tolerance for solitude. But when that solitude bears fruit, you can abandon it. You can be in the company of others.

I think that's the thing that memoir can do more than anything it does; it testifies and bears witness to the existence of people whose lives, pleasures and virtues would never have been testified to without my having done it. That makes me really glad.

At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars.