Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

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 tantrums of cloth-headed celluloid idols are deemed fit for grown-up conversation, while silence settles over such a truly important matter as food.

Far too many people hide behind their busy lifestyles

To be a soul winner is the happiest thing in this world.

Simply minding one's own business is more offensive than being intrusive. Without ever saying a word one can make a person feel less-than.

All afternoon in the deck chair, I try to describe to my notebook the colors of the water and sky. How to translate sunlight into words?

The city is like a great house, and the house in its turn a small city.

Anything worth doing hurts a little.

My hair had been dyed blonde for Dredd. After Dredd, I was really fried because of the blonde hair dye, and so I cut it into a bob with bangs and that's how it was during Being Flynn.

Very little about being a writer is signing an autograph. It's sitting in a room and writing. Getting it out.

Pete Rose is baseball.