I met Powel Crosley at an All-Star Game in 1935. He was familiar, of course, with our winning record at Rochester. We seemed to hit it off immediately, and the following year, when he was looking for a successor to Larry MacPhail, he thought of me.

My first interest in baseball is the welfare of baseball itself. My second is the Cincinnati Reds, and my third is Warren Giles.

People frequently ask me if adverse criticism bothers me. I've had a lot of it, and I have been able to shrug most of it off.

You must prune dead or dying wood.

Alliance does not mean love, any more than war means hate.

The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.

I was interested in the war part of 'Star Wars,' so I started reading about what it's like to go to war, what that does to you psychically, about the adrenaline and the rush.

If war illuminates love, love offers the possibility of allowing some light to be brought back out of the shadows. It's almost as if they buttress and make possible an understanding of each other.