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.

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

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

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

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.

To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.

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