Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.

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

You know what I think about violence. For me it is profoundly moral -more moral than compromises and transactions.

Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength.

The secret to being successful from a trading perspective is to have an indefatigable and an undying and unquenchable thirst for information and knowledge.

Time is fluid, so the moments where everything feels perfect pass in a wink, and those where you're on your knees in despair drag on like the death of a thousand cuts.

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

One person's "paranoia" is another person's "engineering redundancy."

Some day I'm gonna call me up on the phone, so when I answer, I can tell myself to shut up.

I couldn't touch my toes with straight legs, but I could break 4 minutes for the mile.

World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.

Best friends make good times better and hard times easier!