Good poets borrow; great poets steal.
— David Shields
All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in.
I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write.
I'm not super-polite or civil - I try to be civil, but I'm not into Seattle's niceties, and I'm not hugely wired into Seattle's natural beauty.
The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.
I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.
It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.
I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.
Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.
Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever.
One of my clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the first time.
In the case of the Web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience - a few more people slide through the door - but Facebook is finally a crude, personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine. New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away.
Sports - especially the NBA - function as a place where American society pretends to discuss and pretends to solve questions and historical agonies that can't possibly be solved within the realm of sports.
We hunger for connection to a larger community.
A book makes claims of literary art.
When I was studying at the Iowa Writers School, I read a sports writer, Ron Maly, from the Des Moines Register. He was a good sports writer. I became real interested in the contrast between Lute Olson, who was the coach of Iowa at the time, and Ron Maly.
The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don't have the same kinds of flaws your subject has.
All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.
Honesty is the best policy; the only way out is deeper in: a candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating.
I would hate to be that person who is, you know, the mystery writer who has to deliver a book every year to publisher X.
Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.
I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects.
I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.
I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.
Art, like science, progresses, and to me it's bizarre that a lot of acclaimed and popular and respectable books are not advancing the art form.
Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.
Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt.
Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture: to reflect back its 'whatness,' refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness.
Reality isn't straightforward or easily accessible.
I think the core of fans' relationship is one that vacillates schizophrenically and mercurially from reverence to resentment. Fans fetishize the players' athletic genius and both deify it and demonize it; witness the way awe turns into anger whenever a player holds out or flips off the offensive coordinator.
When it's between the covers of a book, content is perceived to have literary substance - or more so that it might otherwise.
A sports writer is a stylist of some kind. He is trying to convey mood and character and emotion.
We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time.
That's why people read books. You get to have the real conversation, as opposed to the pseudo-conversations we have in everyday life.
Centenarians tend to be assertive, suspicious, and practical.
I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is.
The only rule is never be bored.
When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.
I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.
From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.
I am interested in work that jumps boundaries, and that makes trouble. Part of me is comfortable with that: with being a bit of a troublemaker.
In music, they're not endlessly rewriting Beethoven's 'Third Symphony;' in visual art, they aren't painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward.
We've been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we've been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums.
I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing.
New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and - possessing a vision unhumbled by technology - use them to disassemble/recreate the Web.
I try to be as honest as I possibly can about the contradictions within my own heart and thereby get to something 'true' and revealing and important about contemporary American culture and human nature.
The originating sin of America is slavery, for which reparations should be paid and will never be paid; as a result, mini-reparations are paid daily, and the NBA remains, for me, reparations theater.
I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense.
I think of sports writers as mediating between two worlds. Athletes probably think of sports writers as not macho enough. And people in high culture probably think of sports writers as jocks or something. They are in an interestingly complex position in which they have to mediate the world of body and the world of words.
I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.
