One of the inspirations for my becoming a writer was the baseball board game Strat-O-Matic.

I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.

I always had a curiosity about Texas. I had a curiosity about small-town life, although, granted, Odessa's not a tiny town.

If someone is going to criticize what you've written and you believe in what you've written then you should respond.

Teams are made up of a lot of components. They're made up of hunger, they're made up of desire, they're made up of chemistry, and they're made up of emotion.

Athletics: it's a wonderful thing, it's a spell-binding thing, nothing in life has quite as much pageantry, as much emotion within a finite time frame, it's incredibly exciting.

If you leave your wife and you don't ever contact her again, that says something about how you felt about the marriage.

Maybe it's a tired tale, but without an education, you're not going to go anywhere.

One of the exciting things about reporting is going to places you've never been to before.

Well I just always wanted to be a newspaper reporter.

Because Cards' fans are the most knowledgeable and loyal in all of baseball, they booed almost reluctantly, polite as booing goes, what would have passes as a standing ovation in Philly.

Glory is reserved for the twisted minds.

There's no room in perfection for insecurity.

Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.

Those who travel the high road of humility are not troubled by heavy traffic.

The Founding Fathers worried that some common impulse of passion might lead many to subvert the rights of the few. It's a rational fear, one that is played out endlessly.

It's not so unusual to run out of someone else's currency.

I'm a power fanatic. I like to own things, and have them be mine. Acting doesn't belong to you, if you're not the writer or the director.

It's a strange world, as David Lynch would say

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

When pain and suffering come upon us, we finally see not only that we are not in control of our lives but that we never were.