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.

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.

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

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

And if the stars should ever die, we'll make our own light, you and I.

I write because I want to fall in love with love over and over again

Ours is not to wonder why. Ours is just to do or die.

Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.

We are here to spend ourselves on others; for each person is a great treasure.

I think much has been made of this alter ego business. I mean, I actually stopped creating characters in 1975 - for albums, anyway.

Obviously with the Internet and increased access to other means of watching shows, the audience has dispersed and is all over the place and that is a challenge.

I can't draw a line between myself and stuff that I do. It's funny, I don't want to sound like it's just about this, but really with everything I do, it's hard for me to take myself out of it.

It’s hard to think of another field in which experience is considered a liability and those who know the least about the nuts and bolts of an enterprise are embraced as experts.

Mario sees himself in Nintendo DS, and he feels like flying.