In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty's torch. In football you run over somebody's face.

The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.

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.

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

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.

Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.

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