To distract myself from thoughts of my father, i decided to check out the dead body.
People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
Baseball is a team game but, at the same time, it's a very lonely game: unlike in soccer or basketball, where players roam around, in baseball everyone has their little plot of the field to tend. When the action comes to you, the spotlight is on you but no one can help you.
Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.
To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
It was strange the way he loved her; a side long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention.
We all have someone we think shines so much more than we do that we are not even a moon to their sun, but a dead little rock floating in space next to their gold and their blaze.
Michelle Obama gives a speech, and everyone loves it. It's fantastic. They think she's absolutely great. My wife, Melania, gives the exact same speech. . . And people get on her case.
Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.
Truth is fire, and to speak the truth means to shine and to burn