“My parents are in many ways embodiments of the American Dream. They came to this country with basically nothing but the clothes on their backs, and after twenty years of hard work, sweat, and sacrifice, they were getting divorced, totally broke, and deep in therapy.”

“There were so many ways to be twenty-six years old.”

“You see twenty-six years ago, when I was in high school, my goal and mission in life was to win a New York State Wrestling Championship. I committed myself to a lifestyle, made the sacrifices, put in the time, starved myself, shaved my head, had the hunger, desire and determination, but I came up short. For many years, after I graduated it seemed like I got nothing out of my six years of total dedication to the sport. That the trade off of what I gave and what I got in return to this sport was way out of whack.I hated wrestling for it. To put every ounce of your soul into achieving something and to get nothing out of it in return was beyond my comprehension and could not be justified in my head.Until I had adversity in my life.And slowly but surely I started realizing how much the sport of wrestling actually has given back to me. Much more than I ever knew.When life throws you to your back, you need to know how not to get pinned, get off of your back and do enough to make up the difference in order to win.”

“In the fifty years my parents were married, in the thousands of conversations my dad had with me, it had just never come up. And so there I was, weeks after his death, getting another lesson from him about the meaning of sacrifice—and about the power of humility”

“Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.”

“I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American Dream, to justify this distinction. We in ancient countries have our past--we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.”