You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing.

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.

Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.

The ways in which I was obsessed with Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp 20 years ago is completely replicated by my daughters' and my crush on Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman now.

The N.F.L.'s rule on underclassmen should be abolished, and the N.B.A. should be discouraged from adding an age limit.

The real impulse of most books is to tell a story to keep the reader lashed to the page. I don't get why that's a proper use of an adult's time.

I'm a sucker for sports movies.

Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized.

That's why people read books. You get to have the real conversation, as opposed to the pseudo-conversations we have in everyday life.

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.

The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.

I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive.

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.

Are black people conscious of how excruciatingly self-conscious white people have become in their every interaction with black people? Is this self-consciousness an improvement? Maybe not, because I'm thinking of people in categories rather than as people, which is a famously dangerous thing to do.

I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.

I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write.

A book makes claims of literary art.

I'm very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art, and a life-lived-told can be art as well.

Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal.

The only rule is never be bored.

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.

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.

Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That's why I pick at my scabs.

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.