The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

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 attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes peace.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don't know.

Birth is a bittersweet event ... a place where heaven and earth collide in a perplexing clash of hopes, dreams, facts, fears, questions, and expectations.

Because on some level, even though it never turns out to be true, and even though I should know better, I still expect life to be like the movies.

I have a hard time really claiming my place as a songwriter or as doing anything of import really because I feel like I'm tooting my own horn in a way.

I have no interest in emo. I'm all about rap metal.

I have read all that has been written by the gravest authorities on political economy on the subject of rent, wages, taxes, tithes.

The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!

Your body Hurts me as the world hurts God

We control the content of our dreams.