In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.

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

I travel to know the life of great souls in the pages of a book.

I see in Jesus not only the supreme act of humility in God, but the supreme act of humanity in God.

The atonement in Jesus Christ's blood is perfect; there isn't anything that can be added to it. It is spotless, impeccable, flawless. It is perfect as God is perfect.

It's easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.

The first step is always to succeed in becoming surprised - to notice that there is something funny going on.

We are simultaneously the most hated, loved, feared and admired nation on this planet. In short, we are Frank Sinatra.

A man, well, he'll walk right into Hell with both eyes open. But even the devil can't fool a dog.

I found that laughter was a form of acceptance, and I really enjoyed that and I just - I crave it.

What a great hitch to pit!

It is most difficult, in my mind, to separate any success, whether it be in your profession, your family, or as in my case, in basketball, from religion.