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.

Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.

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.

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.

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

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