We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.