When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

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

If you start to do things that nobody does, you will get things that nobody gets.

When facts give way to faith, then and only then do you unlock the possibilities within.

If you want to be treated like a mother, act like one.

Only half a page left now. Shall I fill it with 'I love you, I love you'-- like father's page of cats on the mat? No. Even a broken heart doesn't warrant a waste of good paper.

There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.

I don't need a director who's 'good with actors.'...A master manipulator is heaven.

I will always speak out when someone says that a principle or a rule or a tradition trumps people.

The aesthetic, as I understand it, is really about the way in which we understand beauty and speak and think about beauty.

We are responsible for what we hear other people say and for how we act.

There's something about music that makes me feel like a different person, that feels like an escape.