Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.

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.

Joe DiMaggio batting sometimes gave the impression, the suggestion that the old rules and dimensions of baseball no longer applied to him, and that the game had at last grown unfairly easy.

Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.

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

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

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