I never understood people who don't have bookshelves..

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury..

The New York Times published the guest list on the front page. The masks were a brilliant concept..

Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I’m sort of crazy baffoon who can’t make up his mind what to do in life.

Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else..

You do not cut a check in the state of Kansas to John Doe, executioner. The executioner is paid in cash so there's no trail to him.

It's like people always say, Well, does sport teach you anything in life? It teaches you certain things, but it doesn't teach you other things. It do….

Art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction..

My favorite monologue in the book is Kate Harrington's story of her relationship with Truman..

As happens with people who love a thing too much, it destroys them. Oscar Wilde said, 'You destroy the thing that you love.' It's the other way aroun….

He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me..

Rick Bass is one of the best writers of his generation..

The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book..

I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun..

I remember being awed by it - the uniqueness and nicety of style - and I suspect I was a bit jealous because we were more or less of the same generat….

The pleasure of sport was so often the chance to indulge the cessation of time itself--the pitcher dawdling on the mound, the skier poised at the top….

Golf cannot be played in anger, or in any mood of emotiional excess. Half the golf balls struck by amateurs are hit if not in rage surely in bewilder….

At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely….