I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.

I was a workaholic. I never stopped. I lived in fifth gear. I bought cars. I invested in stocks. I made more money than I had ever imagined.

I would lying if I said I would laugh in the face of death.

I've always said I have one skill. That skill - if I have it at all - is storytelling.

If you are fully alive to the prospect of dying, you really start reprioritising your life.

Love each other or die.

People who don't normally read make an exception for my books, possibly because they're short.

This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun.

If you really could fit God in a file, you wouldn't need to believe in God, you know, you'd just go get the file like a box of corn flakes off the shelf.

I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'

In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.

Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.'

If you're always battling against getting older, you're always going to be unhappy, because it's going to happen anyhow.

People are only mean when they're threatened, and that's what our culture does. That's what our economy does.

I believe the biggest themes of life are put into the best focus when held up against the very sharp light of mortality.

We all lose somebody we care about and want to find some comforting way of dealing with it, something that will give us a little closure, a little peace.

I believe that you live on inside the hearts and minds of everyone you've touched while you were here on earth.

We all have two things in common, no matter who we are: We were born and we are going to die.

For better or for worse, I've watched people die in front of me. I see how they are in the end. And they're not cynical. In the end, they wanna hold somebody's hand. And that's real to me.

I used to be a classic workaholic, and after seeing how little work and career really mean when you reach the end of your life, I put a new emphasis on things I believe count more. These things include: family, friends, being part of a community, and appreciating the little joys of the average day.