The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.

You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book.

My judgement is not good when I am on a book tour. I am not thinking about it that much. What happens is I will go back home. I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old and a wife who is now taking care of them who is wondering where her husband is.

The Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven. You can't go fire half your scouts here because they are all friends with the local reporters. Your life is going to hell in the papers.

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.

In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.

The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons.

If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the Red Sox would win the World Series, I would say it was those people that go to Fenway Park to watch the games. And then the media around it.

There are several insights at the heart of the A's system that I think are wonderful for baseball. One, that it's a team game. That no one player is going to make that much of a difference to your team, so for god's sake don't go blow a quarter of your budget on one guy.

The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.

The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.

Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.

I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldn't it be nice if they looked in the mirror?

Why pay $20 million to Harrison Ford? I don't even understand that. They think they have to do it... If someone puts a price on himself, that suggests he is irreplaceable, then he better find somewhere else to work.

I don't think there is a national pasttime. Watching TV is a national pasttime. Really. If there is a national pasttime, it is watching TV.

People who think they know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports press - no matter how much evidence you present them to the contrary they will continue to think that what they think is right.

There has been this - and it's reflected in the broadcasts - this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic.

The Oakland clubhouse is a wonderful place. A lot of these guys feel like rejects. They were rejects and they feel - they can tell you how baseball screwed up.

You can anchor the mind into answering a question a certain way by giving them a totally unrelated piece of information dropped before.

A banking system is an act of faith it survives only for as long as people believe it will.

Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich.

My romantically favorite era is 78, 79 listening to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 4, the live tapes, echo chamber and break beats.

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.

Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world.

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

I take it for granted that you do not wish to hear an echo from the pulpit nor from the theological class-room.

The intention was to shoot short films that can exist as shorts independently, but when I put them all together, there are things that echo through them like the dialogue repeats; the situation is always the same, the way they're shot is very simple and the same.

Translation is at best an echo.

I will offer a choice, not an echo.

Remorse is the echo of a lost virtue.

To me, there is nothing better than me going into the studio with a live band and hearing those violins and that echo and that sound. I mean I loved it.

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

When you're singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It's happening.

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.

Even Echo speaks not on these radiant moors.

Sublimity is the echo of great mind.

It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.

What passes for real debate in Washington often seems more like an echo chamber, with politicians talking at politicians.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Fame is the echo of actions, resounding them to the world, save that the echo repeats only the last art, but fame relates all, and often more than all.

You arrive at a village, and in this calm environment, one starts to hear echo.

As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

An appeal to fear never finds an echo in German hearts.

We incorporate various electronic devices - the echo plugs and things like that. Actually, all we're trying to do is make that sound musical. As opposed to just making sounds, we do musical things with them.