"All art is theft."
"During Ronald Reagan's administration, '60 Minutes' ran a segment about the difference between Reagan's rhetoric and Reagan's actions. The show thought it had produced a hard-hitting piece; Reagan's team called up '60 Minutes' to thank them for the 15-minute commercial."
"The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition."
"Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any."
"We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times."
"The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality."
"I worry that I am not really a person anymore: I'm more of just a writing machine. I wonder what that has done to either my life and or my art."
"In a way, it's taken me 25 years to acknowledge that I am from the West Coast. I was always sort of pretending I was bicoastal or that I really belonged on the East Coast."
"Seattle is still more Caucasian than most medium-sized cities. The sort of psychosexual politics of white fandom in context of black athletes who are also both very rich and slightly angry is just, to me, bottomlessly fascinating."
"You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing."
"Considering the relatively brief careers of professional athletes, teenagers who are good enough to play at the highest level should be able to exploit that market."
"The N.F.L.'s rule on underclassmen should be abolished, and the N.B.A. should be discouraged from adding an age limit."
"I suspect the real reason the N.F.L. and N.B.A. don't want high schoolers and college underclassmen to play with their ball is that they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with National Collegiate Athletic Association, which serves as a sort of free minor league and unpaid promotional department for the pros."
"The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional."
"The individual has now risen to the level of a mini-government or mini-corporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mini-network."
"The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn't matter anymore that I have or am on a network."
"Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule."
"I like art with a visible string to the world."
"From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn't fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched."
"Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal."
"I went to graduate school in Iowa City, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where the most passionate thing I did was attend University of Iowa basketball games."
"Sports passion is deeply, infamously territorial: our city-state is better than your city-state because our city-state's team beat your city-state's team. My attachment to the Sonics is approximately the reverse of this."
"My particular demigod is the Sonics point guard Gary Payton, who is one of the most notorious trash-talkers in the National Basketball Association. He's not really bad. He's only pretend bad - I know that - but he allows me to fantasize about being bad."
"The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses."
"I'm a sucker for sports movies."
