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.

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.

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.

God provides the food, men provide the cooks.

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.

Readers are what it's all about, aren't they? If not, why am I writing?

I pretty much isolated myself away from drums. I stopped looking at Modern Drummer, I stopped looking at websites.

Life is both pleasure and pain, is it not? But why should we cling to pleasure and avoid pain? Why not merely live with both? If you cling to pleasure what happens? You get attached, do you not?

It's a terrible and tragic and counterproductive policy to avoid communicating with people who disagree with us.

Look at the Justice Department, it's full of Jews...The lawyers in government are damn Jews.

Having loved the Stones all the time I was growing up, I wasn't about to see them go and split up. It got very close to it in the 80s, when Mick thought that Keith hated him and vice versa.

Consciousness after death demonstrates the possibility of consciousness operating independently of the body.