H. G. Bissinger

“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.”

“Well I just always wanted to be a newspaper reporter.”

“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 think the older you are, the more you're going to cling to the printed word as being sacred.”

“If someone is going to criticize what you've written and you believe in what you've written then you should respond.”

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

“I actually like football a great deal.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I always had a curiosity about Texas. I had a curiosity about small-town life, although, granted, Odessa's not a tiny town.”

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

“I am 5'6' and desperately wish I was taller.”

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

“But I would much prefer students going to college to learn and be prepared for the rigors of the new economic order, rather than dumping fees on them to subsidize football programs that, far from enhancing the academic mission instead make a mockery of it.”

“Committing unnecessary surgeries is very, very rare. And it's very wrong.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Teams are made up of a lot of components. They're made up of hunger, they're made up of desire, they're made up of chemistry, and they're made up of emotion.”

“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.”