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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating. "

" Seattle's not a particularly Jewish city, and I'm not in any way religious. Since I've been here, I've been a fairly productive, even obsessively productive, writer. "

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

" I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence. "

" The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don't have the same kinds of flaws your subject has. "

" 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. "

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

" We hunger for connection to a larger community. "

" From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life. "

" 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. "

" During Ronald Reagan's administration, '60 Minutes' ran a segment about the difference between Reagan's rhetoric and Reagan's actions. The show thought it had produced a hard-hitting piece; Reagan's team called up '60 Minutes' to thank them for the 15-minute commercial. "

" 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. "

" Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful. "

" Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible. "

Straightforward

" I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world. "

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

" When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture. "

" I suspect the real reason the N.F.L. and N.B.A. don't want high schoolers and college underclassmen to play with their ball is that they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with National Collegiate Athletic Association, which serves as a sort of free minor league and unpaid promotional department for the pros. "

" 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. "

" Sports - especially the NBA - function as a place where American society pretends to discuss and pretends to solve questions and historical agonies that can't possibly be solved within the realm of sports. "

" What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011. "

" 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. "

" The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses. "

" I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form. "

" The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms. "

" I don't know what's the matter with me, why I'm so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor. "

" I am interested in work that jumps boundaries, and that makes trouble. Part of me is comfortable with that: with being a bit of a troublemaker. "