I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.

What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first. They don't know how we're getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don't know that we don't want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don't want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind.

I was showing early symptoms of becoming a professional baseball man. I was lying to the press.

I said I did not know enough about UNICEF to handle a press conference and she said they would not want to talk about it they would only want to talk about films.

I really want Americans, and all of us, to be less afraid of death, and know that it's a passage, but that - don't go to the funeral before the day of the funeral.

Because once you're afraid of one thing, you can get scared of a lot of stuff.