A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story.

More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.

All baseball fans can be divided into two groups: those who come to batting practice and the others. Only those in the first category have much chance of amounting to anything.

There is no substitute for excellence. Not even success.

Baseball is really two sports -- the summer game and the autumn game. One is the leisurely pastime of our national mythology. The other is not so gentle.

Decades after a person has stopped collecting bubble gum cards, he can still discover himself collecting ballparks... their smells, their special seasons, their moods.

Baseball means Spring's Here. Football means Winter's Coming.

Any person claiming to be a baseball fan who does not also claim to have invented the quickest, simplest and most complete method of keeping score probably is a fraud.

I may be the only golfer never to have broken a single putter, if you don't count the one I twisted into a loop and threw into a bush.

Baseball is religion without the mischief.

Football is played best full of adrenaline and anger. Moderation seldom finds a place. Almost every act of baseball is a blending of effort and control; too much of either is fatal.

It’s time to begin to believe that with God on our side we can build a prosperous nation and continent.

Don’t sell yourself short

The victories are what I judge things on.

If I had all the money in the world, I'd still make movies. But I'd want them to pay me in donuts.

If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure, that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

The Quaker upbringing was not strict, but it was frugal. Extremely frugal. One was always encouraged to give away ones worldly goods.

I am in limbo, and in limbo there are no races, no prizes, no changes, no chances. There are merely degrees of endurance, and endurance never was my strong point.

Putin needed an enemy, an Other, against which to mobilize. LGBT people are really convenient: we're sort of the ultimate foreign agent.

The words. I love words. I love to write. Being an artist is what I love.

A combustion engine of ambition and disappointment.