pure science with a splash of black cat

I am also moved again by a sense of the timelessness of baseball. More than any sport, it summons the past. In football, photos from another era look dated, the helmets too dinky, the players too small; in basketball, the players look too white. But in baseball it is as if there is a linear path. It is where, in our society, yesterday and today collide; the boy is thinking of the power of the young Kevin Maas, the father, looking at Maas, is seeing the same compact stroke and thinking of Roger Maris. The son sees the awesome power of Doc Gooden and thinks there has never been a power pitcher like him; the father sees Gooden and thinks of Bob Gibson, and the grandfather sees the same players and thinks of Bob Feller. David Halberstam, Baseball: The Perfect Game

Some six years ago when I was at a dinner party in New York at the home of Roger Altman, a friend who is now Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, a dinner filled with top political people and media stars, wealthy and accomplished men and women, I let the others have their ego time, one after another one-upping each other on what they had done lately and which important person they had just interviewed. I waited patiently all evening, like a great poker player holding the perfect hole card, and then late at night, I played my card, saying (quite casually, of course) that the next I day I was flying to Islamorada, Fla., in the Keys, to interview Ted Williams. All conversation stopped, and I owned that dinner party and it struck me that at the moment if I had wanted to auction off a job as my assistant — not unlike Tom Sawyer, that is, someone to carry my notebooks and tape recorders while I spent the day with Ted Ballgame — I could easily have gone to five figures. David Halberstam, “Sports as a Window of Social Change” (The Sporting News, May 23, 1994)

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can’t help it. Leo Rosten

A writer should have another lifetime to see if he’s appreciated. Jorge Luis Borges

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. Scott Adams

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing. Elbert Hubbard

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself. Harlan Ellison

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra