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.
Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples’ lives for them.
The kind of people I absolutely cannot tolerate are those who never let you forget they are religious. It seems to me that a truly religious person would let his life be example enough, would not let his religion interfere with being a human being, and would not be so insecure as to have to fawn publicly before his gods.
Once you’ve been touched by the land, the wind never blows so cold again, because your love files the edges off it.
You have to make time, even for something as universal as staring at the stars.
If I had my life to live over again, I’d take more chances. I’d want more passion in my life. Less fear and more passion, more risk. Even if you fail, you’ve still taken a risk.
I live. I write. I watch old movies. I read. I watch the sunset. I watch the moon rise.
A ballpark at night is more like a church than a church.
I’m not trying to bleed you. I want to renew you.
Serenity is a very elusive quality. I’ve been trying all my life to find it.
I wonder if there are soft-spoken voices who deliver assignments to all of us in various times... It is nice to think I have company-that others dance to the muted music I hear.
In these days when anything goes in literature, movies, and even TV, to think there are some places so isolated, so backward, so ill-informed as to what’s going on in the world.
He pops a bat twice more on home plate, then tosses a ball in the air and swings. The crack of the bat sounds like a paper bag exploding, yet the sound is cold and lonely, too, like a hunter firing on an endless tundra.
He cranks up his arm, rears back, and throws, and the ball, taking an even more perfect path than it took off the bat, travels in a white arc, seeming to leave behind a line like a streak of forgotten rainbow as it drops over the fence, silent as a star falling into a distant ocean.
Sandor Boatly had never guessed that, properly played, baseball consisted of mathematics, geometry, art, philosophy, ballet, and carnival, all intertwined like the mystical ribbons of color in a rainbow.
Shoeless Joe became a symbol of the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless. The name Kenesaw Mountain Landis became synonymous with the Devil.
The Yankees lose so seldom, you have to celebrate every single time.
Baseball is a ceremony, a ritual, as surely as sacrificing a goat beneath a full moon is a ritual.
Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear.
Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples’ lives for them. I don’t write autobiography.
On the north verandah is a wooden porch swing where Annie and I sit on humid August nights, sip lemonade from teary glasses, and dream.