“American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it.”

“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.”

“Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.”

“Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.”

“For many years I didn't have health insurance.”

“I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go. But there's just that few days of frustration to get to that point.”

“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.”

“I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.”

“I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing.”

“I was a ballplayer, but only for a limited time. I grew up playing in Wisconsin. It's a very sports-centric part of the country that I grew up in and I played a lot of sports, but baseball first and foremost. I played through high school. I was a middle-infielder.”

“In fact, there's a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.”

“It's quite a feeling to finish something you have been 10 years beholden to and to have a clean slate.”

“I've been a Brewers fan since birth.”

“I've earned my living in all sorts of terrible ways - as a janitor, a copy editor, a psychotherapist.”

“Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.”

“Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.”

“Tall people have a real advantage in the world.”

“The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.”

“There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.”

“There's certainly a large literature around baseball in the U.S.”

“To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.”

“When I write for 'n+1,' I begin by doing a lot of reading, to try to convince myself I'm not stupid. Then I scribble down a paragraph here, a paragraph there, when a notion strikes. Then I see if I can arrange those notions in a way that yields an argument.”

“Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself.”

“You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.”

“You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.”