I stayed on the path out of fear, not of being eaten by a wolf, but of being cut, being benched, losing my paycheck. If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing it would be this: "Abby, you were never Little Red Riding Hood; you were always the wolf."

I know it is utterly fanciful to expect professional cricketers to play the game like amateurs; but the trick, I believe, is taking the spirit of the amateur - of discovery, of learning, of pure joy, of playing by the rules - into our profession. Taking it to practice or play, even when there's an epidemic of white-line fever breaking out all over the field.

Invent your own game and that way you can always be a winner.

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.

I was a student at Yale and wrote a paper about the computerized society that was on the horizon. ... Then I sort of let that lie. I didn’t get a particularly good grade on it, as I recall.

He was a little guy who was a great football player at Georgia Tech, and he just was indefatigable. He just would never, ever say die. He absolutely proved to me that persistence was a very big part of making it in life. I never forgot that lesson.

When I first met Sergeant Jackson I had grown a mustache and had taken up the affectation of smoking cigars, because I thought this made me look, you know, quite dashing and much older than my 22 years, or what have you. And the first thing that Sergeant Jackson did after I asked him to, in essence, take the insignia off, you know, just tell me straight up what I could do to improve my performance. And he told me, he said, “Well, the first thing, shave off that ridiculous mustache, and quite smoking the cigars — because you look absurd — and be yourself.” And I don’t think I ever forgot that. I don’t think I ever tried an affectation after that point in my life.