Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.
It's not what you achieve, it's what you overcome. That's what defines your career.
But this is the point I want to make: When you talk about steroids and you talk about what it means to the game, the three greatest home run hitters of all time-Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays, right? When they were 39 years old, how many home runs do you think they averaged? The three greatest home run hitters of all time averaged 18 home runs at age 39. Now, how many home runs did Barry Bonds hit when he was 39? He hit 73!
It's funny. Some people remember that a lot more than I do. I remember certain parts of it, and if everybody who mentioned that to me had been to the game who said they were at the game, there'd be 800,000 people at that game, I think.
I always looked up there, because I remember a time when the only things on the walls in Fenway were the Jimmy Fund sign and the retired numbers. Never in a million years did you think you'd ever be up there with those guys.
If the human body recognized agony and frustration, people would never run marathons, have babies or play baseball.
But there was also a little of that thing they say about New Englanders: Being from here doesn't prevent me from doing anything, it just prevents me from enjoying it.
The idea of the writer who writes nineteen novels, with various ups and downs and levels of experimentation, isn't around so much now. There's a focus, I think, on fewer books, with more pressure on each book to succeed. With that there comes, I think, a certain pressure towards shapeliness in fiction. Towards neatness. And I think writers feel that, and it can effect how they write.
I have a lot of very close girlfriends and sisters - I'm from an all female family. My father often quips that even the cat was neutered!
I would love to see a revival of what we had against the war in the '60s - we could do these teach-ins on the internet, live and split screen, and have real in-depth debate between people that are on the "other" side of issues - nuclear, gun control, whatever. We could really be having a much more democratically involved and exciting debate with people emailing their questions and having a virtual town meeting.
There are so many talented young writers named Jonathan, with whom by comparison I suffer terribly.