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.

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.

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 our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.

We should all celebrate the magnitude of diverse and unique souls that live in our world today, for it is an essence that makes our lives colourful every singleday.

Life is all about Living, Forgiving and Loving!.

Sometimes directors feel like they have to justify that hat that they are wearing they've got on as a director, and they come in and they tweak and interfere.

The measure of who we are is how we react to something that doesn't go our way.

The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring.

You can lie to your wife or your boss, but you cannot lie to your typewriter. Sooner or later you must reveal your true self in your pages.

Grove giveth and Gates taketh away.

I grew up in a city. My parents would think there was something wrong with America if they knew I was secretary of agriculture.

Besides, our nearness to the King in love Is near the hate of those love not the King.