“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.”

Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.

It is not enough to offer a smorgasbord of courses. We must insure that students are not just eating at one end of the table.

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

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.

Baseball has undergone and absorbed a whole set of dislocations.

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.

Once when I went over my work with my Washington University professor, the late great Stanley Elkin, he pointed to a passage of mine and said: Stop vamping. It has remained a caution.

Whether it’s in a phrase like “going over like a lead balloon” or “a needle in a haystack,” or tackling movie myths or even a genre, like MacGyver or James Bond

We’re allowed to explore the world at large on these things; the urban-legend aspect of it is just kind of an excuse.

I always loved Alan Menken songs and wanted my first album to be a tribute to him and his work. I always loved his music.

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

Neil Young, who isn’t really evident when you listen to my music, is probably my favorite of the legends, besides Dylan.

My father was a film-maker. He always said he wanted to go like Humphrey Jennings, the legendary director who stepped backwards over a cliff while framing a better shot.

Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.