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" I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back. "

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" It's hard not to read the success of someone like Hilary Mantel as the product of a world that is too nervous, too crazy, and perhaps too interesting for some people. "

" I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense. "

" I like art with a visible string to the world. "

" Sports movies are often very good at dramatizing the intersection of public and private realms: the body politic. "

" I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel. "

" New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and - possessing a vision unhumbled by technology - use them to disassemble/recreate the Web. "

" You, Dad, in the large scheme of things, don't matter. I, Dad, don't matter. We're vectors on the grids of cellular life. "

" I think of sports writers as mediating between two worlds. Athletes probably think of sports writers as not macho enough. And people in high culture probably think of sports writers as jocks or something. They are in an interestingly complex position in which they have to mediate the world of body and the world of words. "

" People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me. "

" Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal. "

" Stoicism is of no use to me whatsoever. What I'm a big believer in is talking about everything until you're blue in the face. "

" One of my clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the first time. "

" I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom. "

" A book makes claims of literary art. "

" Swimming is by far the best tonic I've found for my back. I'm not a good swimmer - I do the breaststroke or elementary backstroke in the slow lane - but when I took a two-week break from swimming I was surprised how much I missed it. "

" I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller. "

" I'm not super-polite or civil - I try to be civil, but I'm not into Seattle's niceties, and I'm not hugely wired into Seattle's natural beauty. "

" I've always liked this idea that writing should comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable to create trouble. The value of a work of art can be measured by the harm spoken of it. If you're not feeling that, then absolutely, why bother? "

" In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression. "

" Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule. "

" As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. "

" That's why people read books. You get to have the real conversation, as opposed to the pseudo-conversations we have in everyday life. "

" In a way, it's taken me 25 years to acknowledge that I am from the West Coast. I was always sort of pretending I was bicoastal or that I really belonged on the East Coast. "

" Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized. "

" I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive. "

" In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible. "

" Good poets borrow; great poets steal. "

" In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since. "

" The ways in which I was obsessed with Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp 20 years ago is completely replicated by my daughters' and my crush on Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman now. "

" I'm very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art, and a life-lived-told can be art as well. "