Well I just always wanted to be a newspaper reporter.

I think the older you are, the more you’re going to cling to the printed word as being sacred.

My grandmother got her law degree from Syracuse University in roughly 1911 and later co-founded with her husband an investment banking firm on Wall Street known as Lebenthal & Co.

One of the inspirations for my becoming a writer was the baseball board game Strat-O-Matic.

Actually, my dog I think is the only person who consistently loves me all the time.

There are the medical dangers of football in general caused by head trauma over repetitive hits.

Maybe it’s a tired tale, but without an education, you’re not going to go anywhere.

In more than 20 years I’ve spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.

If you leave your wife and you don’t ever contact her again, that says something about how you felt about the marriage.

I’m really not interested in other people’s opinions, because I think frankly most of those opinions are either misinformed and adding to this endless ball of hot air we have in our society where everyone thinks their opinion is valuable and sacred and what counts.

I am 5’6′ and desperately wish I was taller.

I like to write with a lot of emotion and a lot of power. Sometimes I overdo it; sometimes my prose is a little bit too purple, and I know that.

I am the father of twin sons that were born in Philadelphia at Pennsylvania Hospital in 1983. They were 13 weeks premature. Gerry weighed 1 pound 14 ounces, and Zachary 1 pound 11 ounces. They were the first male twins to ever survive at Pennsylvania Hospital.

I worked at my high school newspaper at Andover, which came out weekly, unusual for a high school paper. Then my first day at Penn I went right to the ‘Daily Pennsylvanian’ and pretty much spent most of my college career working both as the sports editor and then editor of the editorial page.

Why did I become a writer? Because I grew up in New York City, and there were seven newspapers in New York City, and my family was an inveterate reader of newspapers and I loved holding a paper in my hand. It was something sacred.

Because Cards’ fans are the most knowledgeable and loyal in all of baseball, they booed almost reluctantly, polite as booing goes, what would have passes as a standing ovation in Philly.

Nothing could be sillier than we got good people here. We got the same cross-section of assholes as anywhere.

Permian had established itself as perhaps the most successful football dynasty in the country – pro, college, or high school. Few brands of sport were more competitive than Class AAAAA Texas high school football, the division for the biggest schools in the state.

Athletics: it’s a wonderful thing, it’s a spell-binding thing, nothing in life has quite as much pageantry, as much emotion within a finite time frame, it’s incredibly exciting.

Instead of understanding that they were the beneficiaries of history, they began to believe that they were the creators of it.

This must not be planet earth,” Cone told his partner. “This must be hell.” But it wasn’t. It was just Odessa.

He saw the irresistible allure of high school sports, but he also saw an inevitable danger in adults’ living vicariously through their young. And he knew of no candle that burned out more quickly than that of the high school athlete.

He firmly believed that football, like other sports, used blacks, exploited them and then spit them out once their talents as running backs or linebackers or wide receivers had been fully exhausted. For a few lucky ones, that moment might not come until they were established in the pros. For others, it might come at the end of college. For most, it would all end in high school.

Let each of you discover where your chance for greatness lies. Seize that chance and let no power on earth deter you.

They clearly saw their town as the one exception in an area of the country once described as having enough ignorance to support not simply a four-year university but an eight-year one.

He and his teammates were the Princes of the City, only they were high school kids instead of New York City narcotics detectives

But “love” is the most empty and overused word in the English language after “brilliant.

It was stupid not to let MacArthur finish off those rice eaters. Push ’em back.

I’m gonna party, see how intoxicated I can get and how many rules I can flaunt. That’s my motto.