A Writer Has To Be Driven Crazy

The Secret To Living In The Rush Of The World With A Minimum Of Pain Is To Get As Many People As Possible To String Along With Your Delusions.

How Easy Life Is When It's Easy, And How Hard When It's Hard.

It Isn't That You Subordinate Your Ideas To The Force Of The Facts In Autobiography But That You Construct A Sequence Of Stories To Bind Up The Facts With A Persuasive Hypothesis That Unravels Your History's Meaning.

For Someone Whose Roots In America Were Strong But Only Inches Deep, And Who Had No Experience, Such As A Catholic Child Might, Of An Awesome Hierarchy That Was Real And Felt, Baseball Was A Kind Of Secular Church That Reached Into Every Class And Region Of The Nation And Bound Millions Upon Millions Of Us Together In Common Concerns, Loyalties, Rituals, Enthusiasms, And Antagonisms. Baseball Made Me Understand What Patriotism Was About, At Its Best.

And As He Spoke, I Was Thinking, 'the Kind Of Stories That People Turn Life Into, The Kind Of Lives People Turn Stories Into.