What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again.

But those of us hoping to have long careers as professional writers have to develop an autoimmune system of our own that can resist the dangerous (in some cases lethal) toxin that resides within.

It’s precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—

They all look at me curiously. Can’t imagine many of them have ever seen an Oriental man running down the pre-dawn streets of Athens before.

The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always.

have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.

The happiest thing for me about this day’s race was that I was able, on a personal level, to truly enjoy the event.

in the end the fallback idea of opening a small bar again never materialized. Sometimes, though, even now, I think how nice it would be to run a little bar somewhere.

The whole process—sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track—requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine.