People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.

There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they're not real writers. That's ridiculous.

When you're a sportswriter, you learn how to use your imagination and to flex your literary muscle, because it's the same game played over and over again. There's nothing unique or marvelous. It's not an earthquake, or a weird mass murder. It's just the same old game played over and over, and you have to bring out the personalities. You have to drag them kicking and screaming out into the light of day, or you're not a good sportswriter.

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years . . . I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your sock drawer, so you could touch it again.

I don't think there's a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book.

And Sandy Martindale ... dated Elvis before the rhinestone jumpsuits and the drugs, when he was sharp and cool and jagged, like porcelain that has been hurled against a wall.