I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

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

Prayer unaccompanied by perseverance leads to no result.

This little man was of the order of beings who must not be opposed, unless you possessed an all-dominant force sufficient to crush him at once.

I've seen enough things to know that if you just keep on going, if you turn the corner, the sun will be shining.

Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.

The role of the storyteller is to awaken the storyteller in others.

As a kid I collected stamps, pebbles on the beach, anything. I liked to have at least 10 of something.

You have to be aware what the consequences are of the approach you take.

What many people today assume Christianity to be is basically Plutarch plus Jesus.

Movie acting is primarily listening. If you're really engaged, that's all a movie audience wants to see is you processing what's happening in your world.

You truly do reap what you sow, so that makes it so important for us to learn to love each other in the here and now.