W. P. Kinsella Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

If you build it, he will come.

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

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

[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 don't believe in the afterlife.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

[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.

It is hard to compare the eras, but Joe Jackson and Ty Cobb from the past, Sandy Koufax and Roger Clements from the present.

I don't have time to read nonfiction.

Found a good voice and took advantage of it. Each of my specialties was like a prospector discovering a vein of gold. I worked each until the vein was exhausted.

Most writers are unhappy with film adaptations of their work, and rightly so. 'Field of Dreams,' however, caught the spirit and essence of 'Shoeless Joe' while making the necessary changes to make the work more visual.

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

My main income came from failed movie and TV options.

The Great Gatsby, the finest novel ever written.

Other people get into occupations by accident or design; but writers are born. I could work at selling motels, or slopping hogs, for fifty years, but if someone asked my occupation, I'd say writer, even if I'd never sold a word. Writers write. Other people talk.

The crack of the bat, the sound of baseballs thumping into gloves, the infield chatter are like birdsong to the baseball starved.

The law is like rope...useful, necessary, strong, but it can be bent and twisted into all kinds of shapes depending on the occasion.

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.

It is the same game that Moonlight Graham played in 1905. It is a living part of history, like calico dresses, stone crockery, and threshing crews eating at outdoor tables. It continually reminds us of what was, like an Indian-head penny in a handful of new coins.

I'm a big fan of curling, follow all the major world events. Watch all four Tennis majors.

I can still put down some pretty nasty stuff on paper, which is what I enjoy doing.

At one time I'd been to every park except Baltimore and Houston, but can't even keep track of who plays where these days.

I've played [Scrabble] tournaments for about 20 years. My daughter, Erin, who lives with me, also travels to tournaments. While I'm not a top division player, I've won a number of tournaments.

In the 70s and 80s, I made a good living. Have managed my funds carefully, will never have to go out and cadge quarters from the tourists.

Discovered W. Somerset Maugham in about 5th grade. Didn't understand the plots, but loved the descriptions.

Curt Flood, of course, was in a class by himself, a true hero.

My dad talked a good game. [I'm as a] child got only the World Series on the radio.

I lost my wife Barbara to cancer few years ago. I would give whatever time I have left to spend one more day with her.

I was lucky to get one good adaptation. Field of Dreams the Musical is lurking in the wings. Hope it will provide my daughters with a ton of money someday.

I became exclusively an American League fan when they instituted the DH rule, and will remain so until the National League moves out of the dark ages.

Yogi Berra, Bill Lee, they were irreverent, poked fun at the stodgy owners and managers.

Until Color TV came along, BW TV was too muddy to be enjoyable.

Basketball is the worst sport. They need to raise the basket at least two feet.

[Mid-list writers are now] less greed on the part of both publishers and chain booksellers. It is easier for them to publish and sell only blockbusters and leave the real work to small presses.

Have never been a minor league fan.