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.

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.

Every now and then I meet someone certain of personal greatness. I want to pat this person on the shoulder and mutter comforting words: "Things will get better! You won't always feel so depressed! Cheer up!"

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

You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.

We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.

The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.