In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a char...
I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths...
When I started in professional baseball, I had what you might call a rude awakening. See this scar right next to my left ear? That's where the pitcher hit me the very first time I came to bat as a pro. I was out cold for about 10 minutes.
We did some soul-searching. Was the cable industry obsolete? Was it an opportune time to get out? Our conclusion was that if you rebuilt your system with this new fiber-optic coaxial hybrid - which we now call broadband - the glass was half full, not...
I think I rushed and I needed more time with my comeback. I needed more time to get my legs stronger to be able to handle the workload. You can only train for that by pitching innings. You can't simulate pitching off a mound in a game inside a weight...
I mean, it's not just one day you get up, bang, and you got Osama bin Laden. It's the kind of thing where an awful lot of people over a long period of time - thousands have worked this case and these issues and followed on the leads and captured bad ...
When I was racing, I had learned that you can't set stock in public adoration or your press clippings. By the time I was 26, I'd heard crowds of 100,000 scream my name, but a week later they couldn't remember who I was. You're a hero today and a bum ...
There was a time when rival teams used a shift against me. They would put the second baseman on the shortstop's side of the bag, move the shortstop into the hole to his right, and have the third baseman hug the foul line. The idea was to build an inf...
I think everybody has a moment in their career where you have to test whether it was right or wrong. We've all been there. I've looked back at performances of my own, where only you know if it is something you want to repeat. As long as you know when...
When do you know it's time to say, 'OK, that's it?' That is the most difficult part of any decision like that because you don't want to throw the 'R' word out there. I've mentioned it a couple times, but not in the sense that I'm doing it. That word ...
There's so much attached to playing shortstop that you lose your concentration on hitting, unless you're a natural hitter. There's so much to think about in the field, you don't have time to think about what you did at the plate last time. 'How did h...
For me, there was nothing like my time with the Eagles - ever. We were young, and the world was new to us. It was the happiest time of our lives. They wouldn't let us play in their big leagues, but we had this game of ours... this marvelous, blessed ...
By the time I left college, I had won every award you could win - I was Mr. Man! Then I got drafted by the Giants, and you step in that locker room, and you feel inferior in every way. You just have to stick around long enough to give yourself the op...
Safeco Field is a lot like a National League park. Because of that, we're more of a pitching-defensive type club. Anaheim and Oakland - and even Texas - are more offensive oriented. We're a club that doesn't blow anybody out, but at the same time we ...
People who don't know me have opinions about me. That's the part that's very hurtful. Because how do you form an opinion about somebody if you've never met them or spent any time with them? So it's all based upon hearsay or things that they've read.
You learn by mistakes. When you make those mistakes, you try not to make them the third time or the second time. You learn from them. Sometimes you learn the hard way. In football, if I held on to the ball too long, I got my butt kicked. You better m...
In the South we experienced, you know, some black kids who gave us a hard time because - cause 'you talk white.' We didn't talk white. We talked fairly proper. Plus, we had a Midwestern accent, so we didn't have a Southern accent, either. So it wasn'...
People talk about that catch and, I've said this many times, that I've made better catches than that many times in regular season. But of course in my time, you didn't have a lot of television during the regular season. A lot of people didn't see me ...
Michael: Every time he comes up, he's got no knife, he's got no jacket, he's got no pants, he's got no boots. All he's got is that stupid gun he carries around like John Wayne.
Michael: Maybe he's some animal that wasn't supposed to live; kind of like those rabbits we saw. He could be a monkey or an orangutan. Elliot: A bald monkey? Gertie: Is he a pig? He sure eats like one.
Gertie: What are you going as for Halloween? Elliot: [Elliot is upset because nobody believes him] I'm not going to stupid Halloween. Michael: [to Elliot] Why don't you go as a goblin? Elliot: [flatly] Shut up.
