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

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.

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.

How much easier my life would be if I did not love you! I thought. How much less painful, but how much plainer. How much less color there would be in the world.

He took the box but did not avail himself of a tissue. She understood. Sometimes it was comforting to feel the wetness of grief's tears on your face.

Sometimes if you jump into something too quickly, you can screw up something that might have been good two years down the road.

I've explored a variety of directions and themes over the years. But I think in my painting you can see the signature of one artist, the work of one wrist.

You don't even need to go to college no more because you could learn how to do everything on YouTube.

Certainly being governor is an important job, and there are quality governors that could serve our country as president and have done so in the past.

A lot of people didn't realize that I acted before I did anything else.

They are most welcome. We will butcher them.

In Paris now, when I walk into stores and the shopgirls literally say to me every time, "We don't have anything in your size".

It’s just been my experience that some kinds of working relationships are better motivated by fear than by monetary gain.