Top 40 W. P. Kinsella Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you build it, they will come.”

— W. P. Kinsella

2. “Syzygy, inexorable, pancreatic, phantasmagoria – anyone who can use those four words in one sentence will never have to do manual labor.”

— W. P. Kinsella

3. “If I had my life to live over again, I’d take more chances. I’d want more passion in my life. Less fear and more passion, more risk. Even if you fail, you’ve still taken a risk.”

— W. P. Kinsella

4. “Any game becomes important when you know and love the players.”

— W. P. Kinsella

5. “Baseball games are like snowflakes and fingerprints, no two are ever alike.”

— W. P. Kinsella

6. “Perhaps crossing the barriers of time has freed me.”

— W. P. Kinsella

7. “The crack of the bat, the sound of baseballs thumping into gloves, the infield chatter are like birdsong to the baseball starved.”

— W. P. Kinsella

8. “Once you’ve been touched by the land, the wind never blows so cold again, because your love files the edges off it.”

— W. P. Kinsella

9. “Hardly anybody recognizes the most significant moments of their life at the time they happen.”

— W. P. Kinsella

10. “Most writers are unhappy with film adaptations of their work, and rightly so. ‘Field of Dreams,’ however, caught the spirit and essence of ‘Shoeless Joe’ while making the necessary changes to make the work more visual.”

— W. P. Kinsella

11. “America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers.”

— W. P. Kinsella

12. “Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That’s why they say, “the game is never over until the last man is out.” Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.”

— W. P. Kinsella

13. “A ballpark at night is more like a church than a church.”

— W. P. Kinsella

14. “Read! Read! Read! And then read some more. When you find something that thrills you, take it apart paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word, to see what made it so wonderful. Then use those tricks next time you write.”

— W. P. Kinsella

15. “Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.”

— W. P. Kinsella

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

16. “Heroes don’t need to talk about what they did.”

— W. P. Kinsella

17. “You have to make time, even for something as universal as staring at the stars.”

— W. P. Kinsella

18. “I am an old-fashioned storyteller. I try to make people laugh and cry. A fiction writer’s duty is to entertain. If you can sneak in something profound or symbolic, so much the better.”

— W. P. Kinsella

19. “Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples’ lives for them.”

— W. P. Kinsella

20. “I can still put down some pretty nasty stuff on paper, which is what I enjoy doing.”

— W. P. Kinsella

21. “Read, read, read, read and then read some more.”

— W. P. Kinsella

22. “Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don’t write them down.”

— W. P. Kinsella

23. “I live. I write. I watch old movies. I read. I watch the sunset. I watch the moon rise.”

— W. P. Kinsella

24. “I knew how to read box scores and who the baseball heroes were before I had ever seen or even heard much of a game.”

— W. P. Kinsella

25. “The kind of people I absolutely cannot tolerate are those who never let you forget they are religious. It seems to me that a truly religious person would let his life be example enough, would not let his religion interfere with being a human being, and would not be so insecure as to have to fawn publicly before his gods.”

— W. P. Kinsella

26. “Shoeless Joe became a symbol of the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless. The name Kenesaw Mountain Landis became synonymous with the Devil.”

— W. P. Kinsella

27. “I wonder if there are soft-spoken voices who deliver assignments to all of us in various times... It is nice to think I have company-that others dance to the muted music I hear.”

— W. P. Kinsella

28. “Baseball is meant to be a contemplative game. They play music to draw young people to the game. If young people can’t come to the game without music, then they should stay home.”

— W. P. Kinsella

29. “I’m not trying to bleed you. I want to renew you.”

— W. P. Kinsella

30. “I have no interest in non-fiction. I don’t read it and don’t watch it and don’t write it, other than a little journalistic column.”

— W. P. Kinsella

31. “He cranks up his arm, rears back, and throws, and the ball, taking an even more perfect path than it took off the bat, travels in a white arc, seeming to leave behind a line like a streak of forgotten rainbow as it drops over the fence, silent as a star falling into a distant ocean.”

— W. P. Kinsella

32. “Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.”

— W. P. Kinsella

33. “Serenity is a very elusive quality. I’ve been trying all my life to find it.”

— W. P. Kinsella

34. “I don’t have time to read nonfiction.”

— W. P. Kinsella

35. “I don’t believe in the afterlife.”

— W. P. Kinsella

36. “In these days when anything goes in literature, movies, and even TV, to think there are some places so isolated, so backward, so ill-informed as to what’s going on in the world.”

— W. P. Kinsella

37. “Baseball is a ceremony, a ritual, as surely as sacrificing a goat beneath a full moon is a ritual.”

— W. P. Kinsella

38. “If I have a choice between looking something up and making it up, I’ll make it up every time.”

— W. P. Kinsella

39. “Someone once described the pitching of a no-hit game as like catching lighting in a bottle.”

— W. P. Kinsella

40. “Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they’re good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear.”

— W. P. Kinsella

41. “He pops a bat twice more on home plate, then tosses a ball in the air and swings. The crack of the bat sounds like a paper bag exploding, yet the sound is cold and lonely, too, like a hunter firing on an endless tundra.”

— W. P. Kinsella

42. “He bats like a lightning rod.”

— W. P. Kinsella

43. “The Yankees lose so seldom, you have to celebrate every single time.”

— W. P. Kinsella

44. “Sandor Boatly had never guessed that, properly played, baseball consisted of mathematics, geometry, art, philosophy, ballet, and carnival, all intertwined like the mystical ribbons of color in a rainbow.”

— W. P. Kinsella