Writer Quotes

When I write for 'n+1,' I begin by doing a lot of reading, to try to convince myself I'm not stupid. Then I scribble down a paragraph here, a paragraph there, when a notion strikes. Then I see if I can arrange those notions in a way that yields an argument.

To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.

There's certainly a large literature around baseball in the U.S.

There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

Tall people have a real advantage in the world.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.

It's quite a feeling to finish something you have been 10 years beholden to and to have a clean slate.

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

I've earned my living in all sorts of terrible ways - as a janitor, a copy editor, a psychotherapist.

I've been a Brewers fan since birth.

I was a ballplayer, but only for a limited time. I grew up playing in Wisconsin. It's a very sports-centric part of the country that I grew up in and I played a lot of sports, but baseball first and foremost. I played through high school. I was a middle-infielder.

I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing.

I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.

I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.

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 really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go. But there's just that few days of frustration to get to that point.

For many years I didn't have health insurance.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

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 which that were the case.

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 everyone has their little plot of the field to tend. When the action comes to you, the spotlight is on you but no one can help you.

American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it.

The course hitherto pursued in musical aesthetics has nearly always been hampered by the false assumption that the object was not so much to inquire into what is beautiful in music as to describe the feelings which music awakens.

Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

One of the best lessons I learned early is that not everything in life is about you. It is about service. If you want trips and excessive gifts, then don't get into public service.

One of my producers said this business is like a hamster on that little wheel thing that goes around and around. You may have a great day and get great ratings, but then you've got another show to do - whatever moment of success or happiness you have you've got to keep grinding it out for the next d

My wife does wish I dressed better.

My life has been a gift up to this point, and I've been blessed beyond my wildest imagination. And wherever this ride takes me is where I'm going.