Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.

An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

It doesn't hurt. Nothing hurts except the small smiles and blushes that flash across the room like tiny sparrows.

If you've ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays with you.

Riches enlarge rather than satisfy appetites.

My wife runs the house much better than I could so I think she could be a linesman or a referee or even a football manager and that's the truth.

For me, punk is about real feelings. It's not about, 'Yeah, I am a punk and I'm angry.' That's a lot of crap. It's about loving the things that really matter: passion, heart and soul.

I paint my joy and I sing my sorrow.

I watched the Olympics as a kid. It would be fun to try to win a medal. If I could swap Olympic gold for a US PGA Championship? I'd take the Major every time.

Originality is in the eye of the beholder.

The Church needs your faith, your idealism and your generosity, so that she can always be young in the Spirit.

Obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction.