Roger Angell

“The great thing about catchers is that they do a lot of different things, and they're basically overlooked.”

“I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.”

“I've been lucky. I've met a lot of baseball people, and I've learned to value people who talk - people who talk well and in long sentences and even long paragraphs.”

“What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first. They don't know how we're getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don't know that we don't want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don't want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind.”

“A recent study of three thousand New England high-school kids shows that students with B averages or better enjoyed seventeen to thirty-three minutes more sleep and went to bed ten to fifty minutes earlier than students with C averages.”

“Once I could persuade these guys that all I wanted to hear from them was what they did - Tell me what you do - once you can persuade someone that this is all you're after, you can't shut them up because we're all fascinated by what we do.”