There is no substitute for excellence. Not even success.

More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.

All baseball fans can be divided into two groups: those who come to batting practice and the others. Only those in the first category have much chance of amounting to anything.

Baseball is really two sports -- the summer game and the autumn game. One is the leisurely pastime of our national mythology. The other is not so gentle.

Decades after a person has stopped collecting bubble gum cards, he can still discover himself collecting ballparks... their smells, their special seasons, their moods.

Baseball means Spring's Here. Football means Winter's Coming.

Any person claiming to be a baseball fan who does not also claim to have invented the quickest, simplest and most complete method of keeping score probably is a fraud.

I may be the only golfer never to have broken a single putter, if you don't count the one I twisted into a loop and threw into a bush.

Baseball is religion without the mischief.

Football is played best full of adrenaline and anger. Moderation seldom finds a place. Almost every act of baseball is a blending of effort and control; too much of either is fatal.

Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.

Don't keep looking for "something" in the bag of "nothing". You will see the same thing again and again no matter how many times you repeat the look.

You're not going to be immediately good at anything you do. You wouldn't quit on the first day of your new job, so why quit on the first try at doing something else?

A decision is a responsibility, if you cannot handle responsibility, don't take decisions.

You don't have to burn books, you don't have to rebel against teachers to rebel; to rebel is to truly own your own self.

To become successful and outstanding at something, we don't have to come up with something new; we need only find ways of doing it better.

The bravest soldiers aren't unafraid, but they're the ones who are able to harness their fear on behalf of courage.

Through my years as a writer, I've learnt how to simplify the message and pen songs that have a more specific quality - it's not just about my ego and trying to meet girls.

Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away.

It is wretched business to be digging a well just as thirst is mastering you.

I have a phenomenal memory. I remember every single thing that anybody said to me, ever did to me, who was nice to me and who was not nice to me.