Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

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

I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.

Dear Meg, " I said. "I can't be sure about Lityerses. But I think we must try. We only fail when we stop trying.

You are the universe, so see the beauty of nature and feel the joy of life.

If you do not like anything in a particular book, then sit and discuss it. Banning a book is not a solution. We have to tackle it ideologically.

When men of infamy to grandeur soar, They light a torch to show their shame the more.

Today, I say that no nation in the world need be left out of the global system we are constructing.

I question whether I want to be integrated into America as it stands now, with its complacency and materialism, its soullessness.

You only mature when you face problems you can't deal with.

Drunken talk isn’t meant to be printed in the paper.