Your life doesn’t mean what you have or what you get. Its what your‘e willing to give up.

With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.

Most things don’t stay the way they are for very long. I take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that’s soon to come.

Well, I believe in the idea of ‘normal‘ in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.

If sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.

I’ve been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.

The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.

America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people‘s rights and their sense of patriotism.

I have a theory… that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn’t make sense.

Writing is the only thing I’ve ever done with persistence, except for being married.

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.

I don’t hate children. My wife and I just didn’t think we would be good parents, and also by the time we got married in 1968, we were pretty nose-down toward what we wanted to do, and having a child was going to be an excuse to fail.

I haven‘t scoured Dixie out of my voice. But I don’t think that the books that I have written… have really in any way been Southern in character.

It’s interesting to leave a place, interesting even to think about it. Leaving reminds us of what we can part with and what we can’t, then offers us something new to look forward to, to dream about.

When people realize they are being listened to, they tell you things.

Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that

Our ex-wifes always harbour secrets about us that make them irresistable. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.

I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that’s just how it is.

I’m kind of a distractible guy.

She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.

Fear and hope are alike underneath.

I’m an equal opportunity reader – although I don’t much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty.

My father died in my arms. That’s tumult. That’s everything exploding.

It is right that you have to have a tolerance for solitude. But when that solitude bears fruit, you can abandon it. You can be in the company of others.

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.

I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.

Life’s passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.

At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it’s usually long after the real decision was actually made–like light we see emitted from stars.

Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.