J.R. Moehringer Quotes

Bess and I had a talk. January 1919. Everything flowed from that talk, that moment. Everything. Look back on your life and see if you can pinpoint the moment when everything changed. If you can't? That means you haven't had your momemt yet, and you better hold on to your ass, it's coming.

Vegas is like the old definition of writing: though I don't enjoy writing, I love having written. Though I didn't enjoy Vegas, I love having lived there.

The glint of devilment in his bright blue eyes, so blue that the FBI once described them in bulletins as azure. It's the rare bank robber who moves the FBI to such lyricism.

Long before it legally served me, the bar saved me. It restored my faith when I was a boy, tended me as a teenager, and when I was a young man the bar embraced me.

Write every day; never give up; it's supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can't look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.

Boy did he hate banks. He told me once that the Founding Fathers worried more about banks than they worried about the British. They knew that banks had been causing chaos, bringing empires to their knees, for centuries, all in the name of free enterprise. Photographer

Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977.

If only Ed Fleming had a mother who gave such sound advice. The manager of Wazoo's, a downtown Denver restaurant, Fleming is a CSU alum who has been darned giddy about the Rams' recent success. So giddy that he donned a necklace made of Pez candies, a red blazer - and nothing else. A few people gaped (some actually set aside their beers), but most ignored Fleming as he strutted like a red-blazered rooster, demanding that all hail the Mighty Naked Beer King.

Basketball's eras are defined by teams - Celtics, Lakers, Bulls - and baseball's epochs are defined by players - Ruth, Robinson, Mantle - but with football, it's the sideline strategists, the nutty professors and top coated Lears.

You think you choose the subjects of your books. But sometimes, in ways you don't know, the books choose you.

Money. Love. There's not a problem that isn't caused by one or the other. And there's not a problem that can't be solved by one or the other.

Tacked above my desk are photos of artists I admire - Hopper, Sargent, Twain - and postcards from beloved bookstores where I've spent all my time and money - Tattered Cover, Elliot Bay, Harvard Bookstore.

I began dividing life in absolutes ... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it.

Hell freezing over?
I don't know. But the devil's definitely wearing a sweater.

Your ancestral homeland is Queens, fuckface.

To be a man, a boy must see a man.

Did you know Socrates said we love whatever we lack? Or think we lack? Socrates? If you feel stupid, you'll fall for someone brainy. If you feel ugly, you'll flip your lid for someone who's easy on the eyes.

His current theory is that Sutton lived three separate lives. The one he remembered, the one he told people about, the one that really happened.

Do you know why God invented writers? Because he loves a good story. And he doesn't give a damn about the words. Words are the curain we've hung between him and our true selves. Try not to think about the words. Don't strin for the perfect sentence. There's no such thing. Writing si guesswork. Every sentence is an educated guess, the readers as much as yours.

Of course many bars in Manhasset, like bars everywhere, were nasty places, full of pickled people marinating in regret.

Baseball always gets credit for the foundational part of masculinity - the father thing. The eternal game of backyard catch, 'Field of Dreams', the Ripkens, the Griffeys, the Bondses, so on. But football is the real paternal game, because it's a conveyor belt of father figures, in the form of coaches.

A book is the only real escape from this fallen world. Aside from death.

My father was a food lover and a deadbeat dad, and maybe a connection between good food and bad dads was forged early, in the deepest folds of my subconscious, where we make so many decisions about our parents.

It takes just as many men to build a sturdy man, son, as it does to build a tower. You will look back on this time and remember remarkably little of it, excpt the extent to which I tried or did not try.

Every book is a miracle,' Bill said. 'Every book represents a moment when someone sat quietly - and that quiet is part of the miracle, make no mistake - and tried to tell the rest of us a story.

Truth has its place. In a courtroom, certainly. A boardroom? I don't know. I think truth is in the listener. Truth is something the listener bestows on a story
or not

Photographer shoots Sutton in close-up, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway behind his head. The expressway was built while Sutton was in prison. God what a monstrosity, Sutton says. I didn't think they could make Brooklyn uglier. I underestimated them.

Oh kid, it's all about confidence. That's the whole shebang right there. Whatever you do, do it with your nuts. That's how Ruth swung a bat-with his nuts. Court a girl, rob a bank, brush your teeth, do it with and from your God-given nuts or don't do it at all.

Any book is better than no book. Slowly, surely, one will lead you to another, which will lead you to the best.

Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper.

Yeah, says the Newsday reporter, he's a real pacifist. He's the Gandhi of Gangsters.

History is the narrative of people searching for a place to go.

People just don't understand how many men it takes to build one good man. Next time you're in Manhattan and you see one of those mighty skyscrapers going up, pay attention to how many men are engaged in the enterprise. It takes just as many men to build a sturdy man, son, as it does to build a tower.

To simply hold a book, to imagine what it might say, would be a comfort.

While I was busy hating Vegas, and hiding from Vegas, a funny thing happened. I grew to love Vegas.

In Manhasset you were either Yankees or Mets, rich or poor, sober or drunk ... You were 'Gaelic' or 'garlic, as one schoolmate told me, and I couldn't admit, to him or myself, that I had both Irish and Italian ancestors.

It cost me everything, absolutely everything, but maybe it's not love if it doesn't cost us everything.

Now, whenever I need to go online, I confine myself to a tight circle: Gmail, MLB.com, NYTimes.com, Slate and maybe Facebook.

There's that old journalism rule that sunshine is the great disinfectant - which is how reporters bust their way into meetings and such all the time. In sports, I really think winning is the great disinfectant.

While I fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what embraces us.

I don't know. Sometimes I try to say what's on my mind and it comes out sounding like I ate a dictionary and I'm shitting pages. Sorry

I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas ... Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It's about words. It's about a man dealing with life. Okay?

I'm a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn't need to be discovered at all - she's widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished - I wish she were a household name.