“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.”

“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.”

“Boxing has become America's tragic theater. ”

“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible to see your opponent is you …”

“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.”

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

“What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been. ”