I think it's the real world. The people we're writing about in professional sports, they're suffering and living and dying and loving and trying to make their way through life just as the brick layers and politicians are.

It's no accident that of all the monuments left of the Greco- Roman culture the biggest is the ballpark, the Colosseum, the YankeeStadium of ancient times.

Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection.

It was an ideal day for football - too cold for the spectators and too cold for the players.

I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.

Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.

Unlike the normal pattern, I know I have grown more liberal as I've grown older. I have become more convinced that there is room for improvement in the world.