“Writing is like anything – baseball playing, piano playing, sewing, hammering nails. The more you work on it, the better you get. But it seems to take a longer time to get better at writing than hammering nails.”

My own hobbies are rather quiet. I like to read and do needlework, and I love animals.

The people you don’t know turn out to be exactly like the people you do know, same faults, same everything.

I think how you look is the most important thing in the world. If you look cute, you are cute; if you look smart, you are smart, and if you don’t look like anything, you aren’t anything.

the real reason I had wanted to grow up, the main reason I had been willing to even consider becoming an adult, was so I could have as many pets as I wanted.

Free agency screws everybody’s allegiances up. Whether it be football, baseball, hockey, basketball, whatever it may be. It’s really hard.

When I won the World Championship in ’72, the United States had an image of, you know, a football country, baseball country, but nobody thought of it as an intellectual country.

I would rather beat the Yankees regularly than pitch a no hit game.

How can you not be romantic about baseball?

You can talk about teamwork on a baseball team, but I’ll tell you, it takes teamwork when you have 2,900 men stationed on the U.S.S. Alabama in the South Pacific.

So you have to be more mentally focused in baseball.

There are only two seasons – winter and Baseball.

The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.