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.

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 first duty of a man is to love himself. When someone loves himself, he is loving the universe. This universe is existing because of you.

Demand the best from yourself, because others will demand the best from you... Successful people don't simply give a project hard work. They give it their best work.

Raise your love so high that anger cannot reach it.

I know you’ve forgotten me, but I’ll remember you as long as I live.

I remember being onstage once when I didn't have fear: I got so scared I didn't have fear that it brought on an anxiety attack.

A husband is like a fire. He goes out when unattended.

Thank you 'adults who wear back packs' for letting me know that I don't have to take you seriously

All is but lip-wisdom which wants experience.

You must stop this interview now as I have come to end of my personality.

Well, honey, a shot never does a coke any harm!