When a teacher is paying extra attention to your child, you believe that it's because you raised such an exceptional kid, one that stands out head and shoulders above the rest of her booger-eating friends.

I found that life for me gets a lot more serious as you get older. You start off young and happy and smiling and Wooo! I'm having fun! And then you get married, and that's very serious, and you have kids, and that's very, very serious. So as you get older, you start thinking about passing away, and that becomes extremely serious.

You become a parent, and your whole life becomes about worrying. You just worry constantly whether they'll be okay. And the idea that I'll be worried forever about them and what they do...I almost have a panic attack when I think about it. I'm worried, and I'm worried about having to worry so goddamn much.

When you're 18, when you're at college, sports can be your life. You can watch every baseball game, every college basketball game, every football game. Once you have a family and kids, you can't do that anymore.

I was strangely looking forward to writing about my DUI arrest, only because I've known for four years that I was gonna write about it somehow. I dunno that it was fun to write, just something I'd been aching to purge from my system.

Once ESPN leaves you, and you don't have a foothold anywhere else, you're done. It's very hard to do anything else, because in some ways, they're the only game in town.

I think I liked writing a novel better. Obviously, it's more rewarding. It's that marathon thing where it sucks when you're doing it, but you're proud of yourself at the end, and you've done it, and at the very least, nobody can take that away from you.

I occasionally get glimpses, but I have to reprioritize, because that's how it naturally progresses - things like family, responsibilities, and your job all take precedent.

I've hated cockroaches my entire life.Tweeting jokes about it helps me cope, in a way. I'm not as jumpy killing cave crickets as I used to be. I still jump plenty though.

I'm always amazed by people like David Simon or the people at The Simpsons or J.K. Rowling who can create dozens and dozens of memorable characters. It seems so effortless, and even people who have just three lines in the shows or in the book have a very distinct personality, and you can feel the richness of their personal history.

If you have a great characters, you can always have your character do nothing or do something stupid, and people will still follow them, because they're so real and so tangible.

You'll paint some nursery and the kid will want to sleep in a drawer.

You're going to have Yahoo! and places that don't have rights being much more aggressive in how sports news is covered.

You need to be funny in a way that people feel like you're trying to make a deeper connection. So that's what I try to do.