My father loved baseball and he cultivated my talent. I don't think he ever had any doubt in his mind that I would play professional baseball someday.

Trying to sneak a fastball by Ted Williams was like trying to sneak a sunbeam by a rooster in the morning.

Nowadays, they have more trouble packing hair dryers than baseball equipment.

I was only a gun captain on the battleship Alabama for 34 months. People have called me a hero for that, but I'll tell you this - heroes don't come home. Survivors come home.

I try to be a good human being and keep up with what's going on in the world by reading and staying in touch with the current events.

If you believe your catcher is intelligent and you know that he has considerable experience, it is a good thing to leave the game almost entirely in his hands.

I needed to join the Navy. If you ask the people in Europe who won World War II, they don't say the Allies, they say the United States won the war and saved the world.

I would rather beat the Yankees regularly than pitch a no hit game.

Life comes down to honesty and doing what's right. That's what's most important.

Cooperstown is the greatest place on Earth.

You can talk about teamwork on a baseball team, but I'll tell you, it takes teamwork when you have 2,900 men stationed on the U.S.S. Alabama in the South Pacific.

I should have titled it "Diet Like Your Life Depended On It!" because it's about so much more than just beating Diabetes.

She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one. She spent hours on the riverbank. She smoked cigarettes and had midnight swims...

You can't control what people gravitate to and what they don't. We can only control the work that we do and try to give it the best that we can.

The memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain.

I don't pretend for a second that I'm that great of a person on a day-to-day basis. I'm a deeply flawed human.

I feel myself becoming the fearless person I have dreamt of being. Have I arrived? No. But I'm constantly evolving and challenging myself to be unafraid to make mistakes.

I'm not good at debating - I'm much better at pontificating.

Love is talkative passion.

Whatever be the motives which induce men to write,--whether avarice or fame,--the country becomes more wise and happy in which they most serve for instructors.

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.