A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

We are surrounded by story.

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

I loved him, you know, ' she said. 'I would have loved him as hard as he'd let me, for the rest of my life.

The American dream, what we were taught was, grow up, own a car, own a house. I think that dream's completely changing. We were taught to keep up with the Joneses. Now we're sharing with the Joneses.

The rest of what I learned about baseball came from Peter Gammons, the Boston Globe's best baseball writer when I was in high school.

There's no such thing as being cowardly in a fight. ~Edward Elric

Billy Almon has all of his in-laws and outlaws here this afternoon.

In a city like New York, any night can be completely different, even in a subtle way.

Moved by a passion they do not understand for a goal they seldom reach, men and women are haunted by the vision of a distant possibility that refuses to be extinguished.

I thought about running a marathon a long time ago, but I'm just not a runner.

When I was 14 I would pick up my brother's bass guitar, and I would just pound on it, having no idea how to play it.

We're all endowed with God-given talents. Mine happens to be hitting people in the head.