"Alcohol was for people who basically wished to be dead but lacked the courage to kill themselves."

“I like to focus on the varieties of paper, the different sizes and watermarks, evidence perhaps of what was typed when and sometimes where and by whom.”

“To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.”

“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.”

“The thing about it is almost everyone could pass that way, but we were kept from doing it by our coaches.”

“Woven into our lives is the very fire from the stars and the genes from the sea creatures, and everyone, utterly everyone, is kin in the radiant tapestry of being. This relationship is not external or extrinsic to our identity but wells up as the defining truth from our deepest being.”

“You can't change your attitude because you're the champion. I've always kept my feet on the ground and never wanted to change.”

“I wake up fairly early every day, by 8, for sure. Sunday is a lighter writing day than the weekdays, but I still wake up and write for about an hour, beginning right around 8. I definitely have coffee first, and then I start writing. I do think it's kind of hard to get the right level of concentration without coffee.”

“There's only one thing we can control, and that is how hard we play.”