My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.

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've been depressed all day. I feel like such a fraud. People say how special and wonderful I am. I think, "Can't they tell? "—Nita, September 18, 1984

There's lots about politics I don't feel comfortable with. To talk about the politics of future ideas is impossible in soundbite form.

So often among so-called "primitives" one comes across spiritual personalities who immediately inspire respect, as though they were the fully matured products of an undisturbed fate.

Most days are not overwhelmingly successful in your life. And what really marks whether you're going to be successful is how well you deal with the bad days, not how well you deal with the good ones.

I'll play for a couple of hours and then before you know it, it's time to go on stage. It takes away any nervousness and anxiety I might have about the big crowd out there.

A loving heart, a heart full of love, is the precious essence of human life.

I've never been out with a married woman, never. I respect others' properties.

Organizationally what is required - and evolving - is systems management.

No nation can last long when it stops praying and takes up playing.

Change comes from a degree of discomfort that allows for and spurs thought and action.