Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.

Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.

Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

You know how, when you fly from coast to coast on a really clear day, looking down from many miles up, you can see the little baseball diamonds everywhere? And every time I see a baseball diamond my heart goes out to it. And I think somewhere down there- I don't see any houses, I can hardly see any roads- but I know that people down there are playing the game we all love.

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.