“Boxing has become America's tragic theater. ”

“No American sport or activity has been so consistently and so passionately under attack as boxing, for "moral" as we'll as other reasons. And no American sport evokes so ambivalent a response in its defenders: when asked the familiar question "How can you watch . . . ?" the boxing aficionado really has no answer. He can talk about boxing only with others like himself.”

“To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.”

“Baseball, football, basketball - these quintessentially American pastimes are recognizably sports because they involve play: they are games. One plays football, one doesn't play boxing...The boxing match is the very image, the more terrifying for being so stylized, of mankind's collective aggression; its ongoing historical madness.”

“Legally I am a ‘widow’ — that is the box I must check. But beyond that — I am not sure that I ­exist.”

“Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.”

“I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.”