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

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.

I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.

For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.

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

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.