As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.

We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

Great literature, if we read it well, opens us up to the world and makes us more sensitive to it, as if we acquired eyes that could see through things and ears that could hear smaller sounds.

Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it

The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye, the story of love is hello and goodbye...until we meet again

It's Not Usual To Be Unusual.

A hard beginning makes a good ending.

An appeal to a goodness which is not in him is, to a vain and sensitive soul, a stinging insult.

For many people, extended reading sessions on an LCD display cause eyestrain.

They do it in Thai restaurants in London. You ask for a drink, and it comes in a glass with loads of seaweed and pebbles in it like a scene from Finding Nemo.

Barking dogs may occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot!

For me, as I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel, I became aware of how on an instinctive level I made choices to cover myself.

When you are gripped by fear in the face of an experience that will take you beyond your comfort zone, you may be at a point of supreme opportunity. You can either break down or break through.

You're trying to play an archetype on one hand and a character on the other, so I felt insanely frustrated, right up until the last shot, and then it ended.