If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you...

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck

Our house is made of glass . . . and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

When you’re 50 you start thinking about things you haven’t thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity — but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

Study until twenty five, investigate until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn’t have the personality of a politician. We don’t see the world that simply.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Nothing is accidental in the universe — this is one of my Laws of Physics — except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

When poets write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.

Lots of people I was starting to hate who I used to like a lot. But when you like people, you can hurt. I’d made a few mistakes with girl friends, and one or two...

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

I feel that in my novel I’m trying to re-address that imbalance and allow people to see that Norma Jeane was quite sensitive and intelligent, … She read a great deal, she tried to write...

In love there are two things – bodies and words

She ransacked her mind but there was nothing in it

When I first began publishing, I was writing short stories and novels about subjects that only men were writing about — violence and men’s lives,

Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.

It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her...

The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it! — that human beings...

When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

The Falls … a story written with Shakespearean proportions, pitting the power of blood ties against the needs of the individual and the larger community.

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

To be knocked out doesn’t mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable