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 n….

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….

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 r….

A lot of writers choose to live in New York, partly because of the literary culture here, and partly because Brooklyn's a pretty nice place to live. ….

The idea of the writer who writes nineteen novels, with various ups and downs and levels of experimentation, isn't around so much now. There's a focu….

In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted..

... people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering..

There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being..

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 p….

Poetry might be more about the eternal verities, the essence of the human soul, and - although it's reductive to say so - fiction has perhaps been mo….

The effects of MFA programs, and the rise of creative writing instruction more generally, are far more diffuse than people think. Even if you're a wr….

For many years I didn't have health insurance..

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 h….

Baseball is a team game but, at the same time, it's a very lonely game: unlike in soccer or basketball, where players roam around, in baseball everyo….

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 ….

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 whi….

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 eithe….

Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say..

Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars..

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 ….

But baseball was different... You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you f****d up….