My favorite monologue in the book is Kate Harrington’s story of her relationship with Truman.
I have never been convinced there’s anything inherently wrong in having fun.
I never understood people who don’t have bookshelves.
As happens with people who love a thing too much, it destroys them. Oscar Wilde said, ‘You destroy the thing that you love.’ It’s the other way around. What you love destroys you.
The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book.
It’s like people always say, Well, does sport teach you anything in life? It teaches you certain things, but it doesn’t teach you other things. It doesn’t teach, as I say, very much about marriage, very much about how to make a living, any of those things.
Art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
Rick Bass is one of the best writers of his generation.
Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I’m sort of crazy baffoon who can’t make up his mind what to do in life.
He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I’m still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.
At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact.
I remember being awed by it – the uniqueness and nicety of style – and I suspect I was a bit jealous because we were more or less of the same generation.
The New York Times published the guest list on the front page. The masks were a brilliant concept.
It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.
You do not cut a check in the state of Kansas to John Doe, executioner. The executioner is paid in cash so there’s no trail to him.
Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else.