“I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.”

“My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.”

“I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.”

“I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer.”

“There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.”

“Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.”

“There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.”