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.

Football is the most successful cult, in terms of members and profits, in human history. Oh wait, there's also religion.

All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.

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.

We are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn’t embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and all that we have to offer, in the end, is love.

Football is Lotto for kids from economically vulnerable neighborhoods.

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.