W. P. Kinsella Quotes

Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That's why they say, "the game is never over until the last man is out." Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.

Hardly anybody recognizes the most significant moments of their life at the time they happen.

Baseball games are like snowflakes and fingerprints, no two are ever alike.

Praise the name of baseball. The word will set captives free. The word will open the eyes of the blind. The word will raise the dead. Have you the word of baseball living inside you? Has the word of baseball become part of you? Do you live it, play it, digest it, forever? Let an old man tell you to make the word of baseball your life. Walk into the world and speak of baseball. Let the word flow through you like water, so that it may quicken the thirst of your fellow man.

Syzygy, inexorable, pancreatic, phantasmagoria - anyone who can use those four words in one sentence will never have to do manual labor.

If I have a choice between looking something up and making it up, I'll make it up every time.

Read, read, read, read and then read some more.

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.

America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers.

Heroes don't need to talk about what they did.

If you build it, he will come.

Someone once described the pitching of a no-hit game as like catching lighting in a bottle.

Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.

Read! Read! Read! And then read some more. When you find something that thrills you, take it apart paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word, to see what made it so wonderful. Then use those tricks next time you write.

Any game becomes important when you know and love the players.

[I] Played a little softball, but there was nowhere on the field it was safe for me to be.

Perhaps crossing the barriers of time has freed me.

I think it is worse [in 2015] for a mid-list author such as myself. You either have to sell like Stephen King or go with the small presses where there is no money. I was lucky to have been in the right place and time for many years.

My intuition told me that it was the grass that was important.Now it glows parrot-green, cool as mint, soft as moss, lying there like a cashmere blanket.

I knew how to read box scores and who the baseball heroes were before I had ever seen or even heard much of a game.

I don't believe in the afterlife.

My main income came from failed movie and TV options.

[I had ] uneventful, though isolated childhood. Good, kind, stable parents.

After the strike, I lost interest. In reality, neither players nor owners care in the least about the fans. The greed of both factions has destroyed baseball's credibility, at least for the present.

Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don't write them down.