"I just want to play baseball."

"I'm the kind of guy that I never forget my teammates."

"This is our f---g city. And nobody is going to dictate our freedom."

"I'm going to be done when I've decided that I'm done."

"You just have to go as far as you can go. Everyone works his way up."

"I'm a winner, I play to win, I want to make good things go on around me."

"They pick me [to be tested for steroids] every time. I don't know why. I don't know if it's because I'm a big guy, or what, but all I know is all they are going to find is a lot of rice and beans."

"Everybody has something to prove each year. Everybody has a responsibility in this game. Even the batboy."

"I'm not thinking home run, I just want to put a good swing on the ball. When you go looking for home runs, you get off of your swing. So you don't think of homers when you go up to the plate."

"Life is a challenge that you need. There's things in life that are going to throw you into the ground, but if you learn how to get up, that means you are not a quitter."

"My timing’s a little off. But I’m about to get hotter than Jamaica in the middle of August."

"Sometimes you just don't feel the same everyday, it doesn't matter what you do, but when you have people looking forward to seeing you perform for them, that puts you in the mood, and that's natural in Boston. That's why it's such a special place to play."

"The DOCF all started when I made a trip to a local hospital in the Dominican Republic. I was visiting children who had received life-saving heart care operations. I couldn't help but think that in another life, one of these kids could be my own son. If it wasn't for baseball, I may have remained in the Dominican Republic and who knows where life would have taken me. It was then that I knew that I had to use the gift that I received, to play baseball, to do whatever I could to give back."

"I don't try to hit the ball 500 feet. It looks good when you hit it 500 feet, but as long as it goes over the fence, it's a home run. When you swing hard, it takes a little bit of recognition away from you. The power you're trying to increase - you're not all the way through it with your vision."

"I start thinking about life after death. I've got to quit thinking about it because it's very deep. Very deep. Sometimes you start thinking about it, and you don't feel like you want to be alive, so I don't like to get all quiet."

"Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto."

"Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it."

"If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt?"

"Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character."

"I haven't the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out."

"We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail."

"If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever."

"Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings"

"If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve."

"All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints."

"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."

"I hate you' she said to me one afternoon. 'I really, really hate you.' Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help but take it personally."

"I'm the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I've never even met."

"Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat."

"It's just a penis, right? Probably no worse for you than smoking."

"This left me alone to solve the coffee problem - a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight."

"Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute."

"I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer."

"At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me."

"Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?"

"I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed."

"As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts."

"Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it."

"I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, "I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer."

"The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you’re a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence."

"All I do is lie, and that has made me immune to compliments."

"It's safe to assume that by 2085 guns will be sold in vending machines but you won't be able to smoke anywhere in America."

"The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate."

"Weird doors open. People fall into things."

"He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face."

"On a busy day twenty-two thousand people come to visit Santa, and I was told that it is an elf's lot to remain merry in the face of torment and adversity. I promised to keep that in mind."

"Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless - that's what hell must be like."

"It is funny the things that run through your mind when you're sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers."

"Often I'd take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face."

"Oh, for Christ's sake,' I hear. 'Can we please just try to have a good time?' This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn't work. I've tried it."