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" I'm obviously aware that most people don't agree with me, that people like to escape into a coherent world that is apart from their own. "

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" I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation. "

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

" I argued strongly to the American publisher that 'Reality Hunger' should come out first. They thought that 'The Thing About Life' would have more appeal because it's on a broader topic; it's about mortality rather than art. "

" I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing. "

" The real impulse of most books is to tell a story to keep the reader lashed to the page. I don't get why that's a proper use of an adult's time. "

" Seattle is still more Caucasian than most medium-sized cities. The sort of psychosexual politics of white fandom in context of black athletes who are also both very rich and slightly angry is just, to me, bottomlessly fascinating. "

" In the NBA, as in nowhere else in America, white people are utterly beholden to black people, and they're not about to let us off that easily. It's a kind of very mild payback for the last 500 years. "

" 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. "

" We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time. "

" When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise. "

" Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it. "

" 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. "

" To be honest, there are parts of 'How Literature Saved My Life' that began as interviews. Someone was telling me that they think the book sounds very phonic: that it sounds like me speaking. And I don't think it's a coincidence that there are six to ten passages that I cadged from various interviews that I did post-'Reality Hunger'. "

" I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects. "

" Sports passion is deeply, infamously territorial: our city-state is better than your city-state because our city-state's team beat your city-state's team. My attachment to the Sonics is approximately the reverse of this. "

" I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos. "

" Art, like science, progresses, and to me it's bizarre that a lot of acclaimed and popular and respectable books are not advancing the art form. "

" I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write. "

" I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive. "

" The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality. "

" 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. "

" The only requirement of a fan or a patient is the surrender to authority. "

" 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 a sucker for sports movies. "

" The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently. "

" My particular demigod is the Sonics point guard Gary Payton, who is one of the most notorious trash-talkers in the National Basketball Association. He's not really bad. He's only pretend bad - I know that - but he allows me to fantasize about being bad. "

" We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times. "

" 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. "

" I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful. "

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