Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

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

A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad.

It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else's. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party - a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly.

The transitional period was tough, I won't kid you. You go from a certain family dynamic to adjusting to a completely new one. It took a few months for us all to fi nd our feet.

Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.

...it is curiosity, initiative, originality, and the ruthless application of honesty that count in research- much more than feats of logic and memory alone.

A fantastic positive ATTITUDE makes a great day! SMILE!

Women do not want power over men, they want power over themselves.

You know, it comes from my mother's side of the family. She had seven sisters and one brother, and all of them could play instruments. I suppose I picked it up from that.

I don't think there's anything exceptional or noble in being philanthropic. It's the other attitude that confuses me.

I don't believe there's a hole in the ground with demons in it but I could be wrong. Hell is all around us - it's the way we treat each other and the way we treat the Earth. We already live in it.