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

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.

When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.

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

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.

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.