I am an old-fashioned storyteller. I try to make people laugh and cry. A fiction writer’s duty is to entertain. If you can sneak in something profound or symbolic, so much the better.
Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.
Baseball is meant to be a contemplative game. They play music to draw young people to the game. If young people can’t come to the game without music, then they should stay home.
Read, read, read, read and then read some more.
He bats like a lightning rod.
I knew how to read box scores and who the baseball heroes were before I had ever seen or even heard much of a game.
I have no interest in non-fiction. I don’t read it and don’t watch it and don’t write it, other than a little journalistic column.
I don’t believe in the afterlife.
The crack of the bat, the sound of baseballs thumping into gloves, the infield chatter are like birdsong to the baseball starved.
Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don’t write them down.
If you build it, they will come.
Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.
Heroes don’t need to talk about what they did.
America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers.
Most writers are unhappy with film adaptations of their work, and rightly so. ‘Field of Dreams,’ however, caught the spirit and essence of ‘Shoeless Joe’ while making the necessary changes to make the work more visual.
Any game becomes important when you know and love the players.
Perhaps crossing the barriers of time has freed me.
I don’t have time to read nonfiction.
I can still put down some pretty nasty stuff on paper, which is what I enjoy doing.
Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That’s why they say, “the game is never over until the last man is out.” Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.