At the end of night, before you close your eyes, be content with what you've done and be proud of who you are.

I've felt pressure to produce long fiction for as long as I've been writing fiction. There's just an incredible bias in the publishing industry toward novels and away from short stories. They're seen as D.O.A. in the marketplace, which seems nuts to me, given that various collections done smashingly and deservedly well in economic terms.

I do think, as crazy as it sounds, that sports is an addiction and that it should be accorded some of the same supports as any other addiction.

The single biggest reason I got my stories taken in various literary magazines - and I want to stress this - is because I refused to give up. Period.

Even a hundred and fifty years ago, football was popular because it provided a manly spectacle that lots of men needed, after the industrial revolution. We went from a culture that lived out doors and expanded the frontier and fought the Indians to a bunch of guys in offices. So football provided this jolt, a kind of exalted cult of masculinity. And it still does that. Perhaps even more so today.

To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.

Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.