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

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

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.

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.

[The ACC] has secured agreements to allow at least eight of its 12 football teams to play in bowl games if they qualify, starting in 2006, ... The other four ACC schools would advance to the NHL playoffs.

You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.