Teams are made up of a lot of components. They're made up of hunger, they're made up of desire, they're made up of chemistry, and they're made up of emotion.

I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.

I always had a curiosity about Texas. I had a curiosity about small-town life, although, granted, Odessa's not a tiny town.

If someone is going to criticize what you've written and you believe in what you've written then you should respond.

Athletics: it's a wonderful thing, it's a spell-binding thing, nothing in life has quite as much pageantry, as much emotion within a finite time frame, it's incredibly exciting.

If you leave your wife and you don't ever contact her again, that says something about how you felt about the marriage.

Maybe it's a tired tale, but without an education, you're not going to go anywhere.

One of the exciting things about reporting is going to places you've never been to before.

One of the inspirations for my becoming a writer was the baseball board game Strat-O-Matic.

Well I just always wanted to be a newspaper reporter.

Because Cards' fans are the most knowledgeable and loyal in all of baseball, they booed almost reluctantly, polite as booing goes, what would have passes as a standing ovation in Philly.

he who speaks parables knows and understands the real meaning of parables better

When fate hands us a lemon, let's try to make lemonade.

I'm worried that our technology is helping to bring the long, postwar consensus against fascism to an end.

I'm going forward with my plans for life. I'm looking at things not only basketball-wise, but personal-wise.

The same (hated) man will be loved after he's dead. How quickly we forget.

I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.

Lord knows I had what you could call many fashion Don'ts in my day.

I want to have conversations, because they give you confidence in your choices. I learned it first on Boyz n the Hood, but it is not a race-based experience - it is part of the artistic process.

As an economist, I'm aware that life is full of trade offs.

Have patience. Everything is difficult before it is easy.