| "I suffered myself the singular notion that fame was an heirloom passed on from my father. Like him, I wanted to have my name one day called back and bantered about in consecrated whispers." - Current Biography |
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| "I fought because I understood, and could not bear to understand, that it was my destiny - unlike that of my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of the crowd - to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan." - Current Biography |
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| "Suicide presupposes that something is being eliminated.... But what precisely was being eliminated in my case? Certainly not a man. Whatever I was eliminating was so inconsequential as to make the gesture one of trifling and contemptible ease and I began to think how much more felicitous the act would be if I sobered up, as best I could healed my mind and body, then erased some bone and tissue that at least conspired to resemble the human. Only then, I thought, might the gesture take on a certain flair or style." - Current Biography |
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| Cynicism is nothing more than a mask that represses all enthusiasms for fear that that to which one lends an ungloved willingness of the heart might prove unworthy of one's regard...." - St. Petersburg Times |
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| "Without Loomis' support and confidence in me, I'd probably be dead." - Chicago Tribune |
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| "I was pleased to read what McMurtry wrote. You like to think someone out there knows what you're up to. But it's not worth spelling out. To keep writing year after year, you must assume there are readers out there who understand the work." - Chicago Tribune |
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| "Football was an island of directness in a world or circumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it.... It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge. It had that kind of power over me, drawing me back with the force of a forgotten childhood. Whatever it was, I gave myself up to the Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive." - Yearbook 81 Supplement |
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| "With that smile, whatever [Gifford] meant by it, a smile he doubtless wouldn't remember, he impressed upon me, in the rigidity of my embarrassment, that it is unmanly to burden others with one's grief." - Yearbook 81 Supplement |
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| "We all seem to assume there's a jolly world out there. But where do you really see it? I mean, really see it. Look around. Where are our heroes? They're gone. Yet we still live in a society that thinks everything can start over at any moment. We live in a fantasy that we can escape our heritage, that we can reinvent ourselves." - Chicago Tribune |
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| "I enjoy [public readings]. I've taught at writing workshops at the University of Iowa. The hardest thing to teach them is that there's no substitute for sitting down and writing. For every one of them in writer's workshops, there are 100 kids locked up in log cabins, writing." - Honolulu Star Bulletin |
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| "The most difficult thing about striving for adulation is when you finally get the damn thing. Then what have you got? Goofy kids with backpacks knocking on your door." - Honolulu Star Bulletin |
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| "My problem is always one of reining in reality, not of hyperbole." - Current Biography |
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| "Was I, too, insane? It was a difficult admission to make, but I am glad that I made it; later I came to believe that this admission about oneself may be the only redemption in America. Yes, I was insane." - Kildare Dobbs |
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