Nonfiction, for the most part, is facts, and it's "how I was mistreated. I was mistreated. Were you mistreated? Weren't we all mistreated?"

Baseball is a game where you are always waiting, and then when something happens it's like turning a kaleidoscope when you were a kid.

We are herding the young in that direction so that they are not sitting still and contemplating, Goddamn it, a page of exquisite prose by Charles Dickens, which is filled with rage about poverty and the need of a household to survive. That's not in the table for consideration now. And people don't understand that beautiful rage of Dickens because they don't share it. They haven't got time to worry about an oppressed culture, a subclass.

The education of young people is narrowing. They cannot have the scope they used to have. They are being taught in high school by people earnest, still, but maybe less well-prepared than we would want them to be - but not because they are stupid or churlish.

I read a lot of poetry. I read some history.

What to know about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose.

Nonfiction, for the most part, is facts, and it's "how I was mistreated. I was mistreated. Were you mistreated? Weren't we all mistreated?"