Train at the same pace day after day, week after week, year after year, and that's the kind of running the body adapts to. But break out of that comfort zone with a little speedwork now and then, and the body will learn to deal with the new demands.
Beginning runners come in all shapes, sizes and pre-existing conditions, so there's no magic formula for determining exactly how much basic running is needed before you start speedwork. Most experts, though, recommend three or four months of preparat...
The body responds to a calorie deficit by slowing down the metabolism and burning muscle tissue. That leads to weakness, sluggishness, slow times. In girls, it can also result in cessation of menstrual periods, which in turn leads to loss of bone den...
I just got an honorary degree from Glasgow University, and I had to wear around very painful shoes so that I didn't laugh all the way through the ceremony because I felt like an outlaw.
Because I write a book a year, I always want to do one other project every year that's stimulating in a different way. It means you can be working but not using up your prose juice, you know?
People are very frightened in publishing at the moment. Nobody knows what sells. More so now because the market's changing so fundamentally because of Kindle and electronic publishing. It's a fundamental shift in the way stories are put out into the ...
I was always curious about the anxiety a person would feel when you open your mouth and you have an accent. You could have a Ph.D. or be a lawyer, but as soon as you say something, you may be diminished in the eyes of someone else.
What we now call "morality" was evolved – as nearly all social and physical human attributes were – to aid us in survival and, ultimately, reproduction. This morality requires only that we be guided by our developed conscience (or "moral sense") ...
The therapist, he thought, and it bothered him a lot more than it should have. After all, he had nothing permanent with Sophie. He just needed to touch her on a semiregular basis or he couldn't finish his sentences.
John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.
In order to describe a particular subculture, you might want to portray people who are typical or representative of that subculture; but to dramatize it, to make it an interesting setting for a story, you want to bring someone anomalous into that set...
You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.
Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth.
I can't help it. I'm just a big gasbag. I still got leftover barbeque gas." She squeezed her eyes shut tight and did a full minute-long far. "Excuse me," she said.
When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.
We must rid this nation of the United Nations, which provides the communist conspiracy with a headquarters here on our own shores, and which actually makes it impossible for the United States to form its own decisions about its conduct and policies i...
Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externaliz...
How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process de...
Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group o...
Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth.
Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.
