In our public life, California is on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country.

It's highly competitive to be here. People don't come to California to drop out anymore. It's a very striving place.

If the Pilgrims had landed in Santa Monica Bay rather than Boston, we'd have six states out here!

A city where everyone seemed to live in a bungalow on a broad avenue lined with palm, pepper or eucalyptus trees, where there was never any snow.

I don't reverberate to victimhood, probably because of my own life. I refused to become a victim myself, so it's not one of my big stories.

I like narrative, and I ultimately am in love with the men and women I write about, most of them.

The Irish didn't read and write for a couple of thousand years, and I think we developed good memories and recall. We have a sense of the revelatory detail. I look for them.

In the end, people believed what they wanted to believe. The truth had very little to do with it.

If you do not love something, then it does not belong to you. For it wont be long, before you destroy that something, exactly because, you do not love it.-

The dollar that's being paid the players has hurt the game. The players take advantage of coaches. The players' attitude is, "I make more than you, so don't tell me what to do."

Being a mom changes your life. It actually has made me become more comfortable in my own skin and my own body because it's such a growth and a learning lesson.

I'm not the most emotionally attuned guy in the world. My wife says that me writing about emotion is like Gandhi writing about gluttony.

I want to thank my daughter, who told me, 'If you don't win, Dad, you're still good,' ... who taught me how to act.

As ugly as the truth is, it's even uglier when someone says out loud what you've been thinking to yourself.

If you *think* you think outside the box, you're trapped in one.

I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me.

There must be a language that doesn't depend on words.