Vin Scully Quotes

I was acting when I was playing baseball.

When Richard Pryor did comedy, it was like he was having a conversation.

I'm not an interviewer. I have conversations.

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.

The game's the thing. That's why people tune in. They don't tune in to hear an announcer.

That's what writing is: it's imagining that you can make a world. That's what basketball is, too: it's imagining the game as a world.

I guess football is a game of opinions.

I always wanted my stand-up to feel like not just a show, but like you're hanging out with someone for an hour. I like to just talk.

I love travelling to the games and doing them pitchside with Gabby Logan.

Baseball is all about stories, many of which are even true.

The best, most natural dialogue is usually written as if the writer is listening to dictation. You might get stuck on any particular point and have to question yourself; but normally, dialogue writes itself.

When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture.

Baseball is like everything else. You got to study every angle to win.

I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.

The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.

Looking at the ball going over the fence isn't going to help.

I'm surprised how often I'm asked about being a man with a woman narrator. I'm not the first, nor will I be the last. It's been done forever, but we seem to forget that. The whole notion of "write what you know" is not just boring, but wrong. Lately it seems like every novel has to be a memoir. I'm a boring person, but I'm a writer with a relatively vivid imagination. And when people ask me about how I find the voice of a woman, I tell them that my life is run by women.

And so I write the way I myself would like the book to be – if I were a child. I write for the child within me.

Managers are never 100 percent in control. You're at the mercy of the players. When you're a player, you're driving. I'm the navigator. I hardly ever think about driving anymore, unless there's two out in the bottom of the ninth.

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

I kind of realized I couldn't blow the ball by everybody. In high school I could do that, but now it's not going to work. I need to pitch.'

Good fiction creates its own reality.

Every life lesson is on that baseball field.

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.

As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.