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.

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.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Don't let ambition get so far ahead that it loses sight of the job at hand.

The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.

Ambition can be a disease, and it feeds on itself.

My craziest ambition is to take John Madden's job and salary.

There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

I'm just a ballplayer with one ambition, and that is to give all I've got to help my ball club win. I've never played any other way.

Ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens.

People in the U.K. cannot understand whether Blair has lost his mind or whether his ambition to be the second-most-powerful man in the world made him lose his mind.

One thing all stage mothers share is an overpowering ambition for their daughters.

Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

Me only have one ambition, y'know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together - black, white, Chinese, everyone - that's all.

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.

The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.

I should have been smart enough to stay happy. But my ambition ruled my life.

Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.

God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.

I used to think I had ambition... but now I'm not so sure. It may have been only discontent. They're easily confused.

A young man without ambition is an old man waiting to be.

The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion, or delusion.

My ambition in high school was to be a high school coach and teacher, and that's still what I do: teach.

Nothing else so destroys the power to stand alone as the habit of leaning upon others. If you lean, you will never be strong or original. Stand alone or bury your ambition to be somebody in the world.

Nobility of spirit has more to do with simplicity than ostentation, wisdom rather than wealth, commitment rather than ambition.

My one ambition is to play a hero.

I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.