irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page