For better or worse, poetry is my life.

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

I think people are just haters. When they see people doing well, some people, if there's something wrong, they'll pick at that.

You can only fall in love once the next time you rise with it

If you put a Van Halen album in your record collection, it will melt all the rest of your records.

Even cities have their graves!

Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.

You only have to solve two problems when going to the moon: first, how to get there; and second, how to get back. The key is don't leave until you have solved both problems.

Imperfect men have no right to judge other imperfect men.

His writings have made me his friend.

Funk, gospel, blues is all out of slavery times, out of depression, out of sorrow.

By the way, today with digital cameras and editing on your laptop, and things like that, you can make a feature film, a narrative feature film easily for $10,000.