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.
Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything b...
For writers - even sportswriters - bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar.
The worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of new regret, just as you get a glimmer that nothing is worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.
What's friendship's realest measure?I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamities and fuck-ups.
There’s no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one—only plenty of wrong ways.
Sharing the future with someone would certainly mean that repetitions had to be managed more skillfully.
Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible — time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and depar...
Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is qu...
Probably many people’s vision of thinking something through is of this nature: you do precisely what youwant to do—if you can.
No one’s permitted in except contractors, owners, and local officialdom (plus President Obama and our big candied yam of a governor).
Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.
It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?
In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.
I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people--men...
How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of pr...
All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.
Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.
Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing's worth doing unless it has the potential of to fuck up...
The things you'll never do don't get decided at the end of life, but somewhere in the long gray middle, where you can't see the dim light at either end.