Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know. - Richard Ford

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

If there's another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough. The other view is a lie of literature and the liberal arts, which is why I did not succeed as a teacher, and another reason I put my novel away in the drawer and have not taken it out.

...to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...