We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.

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 secret to being wrong isn't to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn't fatal.

American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.

Palestinians were religious in many ways, but they did not subscribe to political Islam, historically.

If you are not prepared to resign or be fired for what you believe in, then you are not a worker, let alone a professional. You are a slave.

If my shirt's off all the time on national TV, with 20 million people watching, I want to look my best.

I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.

I tried to write worse but it was no good; my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged.

If you neglect your work, you will dislike it; if you do it well, you will enjoy it

People follow proven formulas in any business.

Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrines of the weak.