Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You are skilled. I exhort you.
I've been a Brewers fan since birth.
For many years I didn't have health insurance.
Tall people have a real advantage in the world.
I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.
To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
There's certainly a large literature around baseball in the U.S.
It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.
Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing.
There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.
Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.
It's very hard right now to be a pro sports fan. The economics of this stuff is abysmal.
In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
In fact, there's a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.
I've earned my living in all sorts of terrible ways - as a janitor, a copy editor, a psychotherapist.
But people didn't forgive you for doing what felt right-that was the last thing they forgave you for.
It's quite a feeling to finish something you have been 10 years beholden to and to have a clean slate.
Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.
You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.
People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.
You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht.
The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.
It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you've never published anything before.
American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it.
For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day.
... people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.
It was strange the way he loved her; a side long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention.
The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.
Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.
A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, "I don't know what he's doing."
I'm just kind of really interested in athletes as artists of a pretty serious variety and people who devote themselves to what they do in a really incredible way.
I do think that sports is really rich dramatically that, and this is kind of a self-serving thing to say, but I wonder why there aren't more, better sports novels.
My favorite sports novel is End Zone by Delillo. It's such a great looking book too, the black cover with the football player on it. It's just a fantastic little book.
Getting your foot in the door with some publishing people can be important when you're starting out as a writer, but it's also not enough to get you where you need to be.
Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.
Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.
I tended to write the book in these bursts of two or three months at a time. So I would know, or at least feel securely, that for the next few months I was at least going to have a few hours a day.
I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.
He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story.
Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he's wrong.
I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go.
I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.
I think the MFA programs have had a real effect on the state of American fiction, but I don't think it's a question of "this is written by someone with an MFA, and this isn't." I challenge anyone to identify a book in that way. It's totally impossible.
Looking at and shaping your own work is a very intuitive process. You see something you've written in your notebook. It's there on the page and either feels right or it doesn't, and it's hard sometimes to go beyond that and discover why it feels that way.