“Baseball has undergone and absorbed a whole set of dislocations.”

I’m the world’s expert on sterotypes held by academics about athletes and held by athletes about academics. To me, both of them are caricatures.

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

A tremendous social responsibility comes with being a successful public performer.

People will say I’m an idealist. I hope so.

The university is our culture’s assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.

On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way.

[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.

You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.

Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.

This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you’re going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did.

Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they’re here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.

I’m not going to sit here now and say ‘do this,’ or ‘do that.’ But you must – must – expunge any vestige of racism.

Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That’s why we get into trouble all the time. We’re always viewed as naive.

All I ever wanted to be president of was the American League.

There are a lot of people who know me who can’t understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.

I love the flow of the game. There’s a certain fluidity to basketball. I don’t enjoy watching baseball or football in the same way.

In my opinion I really haven’t done anything yet. I still have a lot to prove. I just want to prove to myself that I can play at the highest level of baseball in the world every day.

I hope baseball doesn’t get to the point where everyone’s saying, ‘He takes it [steroids]. He takes it. He takes it!’ because not all of us do. I’ve been big my whole life, and I’ll always be big. That’s all natural.

In baseball, it’s tough to get up for every single game, every single moment. In football, you have 90,000 fans screaming and the band’s playing. I do miss that

At Texas, I was a football player playing baseball. And the way I play I think I still am.

I have fun. I always have fun. I don’t really get in a hurry about anything. I just try to go with the flow and have fun, and that’s how I try to play baseball.

I grew up in the ’60s, which was a creative time, so it wasn’t that big of a stretch to go from a baseball bat to a guitar to a film camera.

There’s nothing bad that accrues from baseball.