I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.

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

Change your language, change your mindset, change your actions, change your life

What good is it to live a life that brings pains?

Native ability without education is like a tree without fruit.

The physician is only nature's assistant.

I get a lot of my inspiration from my family, but I never got to meet my dad's dad.

I will not get upset over men, but instead be poised and cool ice-queen.

The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.

I lost you once, I think I can do it again.

The timid man calls himself cautious, the sordid man thrifty.

I'm nuts and I know it. But so long as I make 'em laugh, they ain't going to lock me up.