John Leonard quotes:

Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.

Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October.

In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.

Aspiring to a souffle, he achieves a pancake at which the reader saws without much appetite.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms.