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.

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.

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.

Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.

The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

Philanthropist: a rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.

Whoever gives nothing, has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be unloved, but not to love.

A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.

The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.

I went far and now I see that the only one I needed was me.

It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinions than our own.

A life's work should be based on love.

I'm a really, really, smart, multi-talented almost-genius, who's very annoying.

I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.