Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The op...posite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the cour...t; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty's torch. In football you run over somebody's face.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Teams move in patterns, in rhythms, at high velocity; one must watch the game abstractly, not focusing on any single individual al...one, but upon, as it were, the blurred and intricate designs woven by the paths through which all five together cast a spell upon the opposition. The eye watches five men at once, delighting in their unity, groaning at their lapses of concentration. Yet basketball moves so rapidly and so depends on the versatility of each individual in escaping from the defense intended to contain him that the game cannot be choreographed in advance. Twelve men are constantly in movement (counting two referees), the rebounds of the ball are unpredictable, the occasions for passing or dribbling, or shooting must be decided instantaneously; basketball players must be improvisers. They have a score, a melody; each team has its own appropriate tempo, a style of the game best suited to its talents; but within and around that general score, each individual is free to elaborate as the spirit moves him. Basketball is jazz: improvisatory, free, individualistic, corporate, sweaty, fast, exulting, screeching, torrid, explosive, exquisitely designed for letting first the trumpet, then the sax, then the drummer, then the trombonist soar away in virtuoso excellence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of ...an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Directors like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors preci...sely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except fo the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Confidentiality refers to the boundaries surrounding shared secrets and to the process of guarding these boundaries. While confide...ntiality protects much that is not in fact secret, personal secrets lie at its core. The innermost, the vulnerable, often the shameful: these aspects of self-disclosure help explain why one name for professional confidentiality has been "the professional secret." Such secrecy is sometimes mistakenly confused with privacy; yet it can concern many matters in no way private, but that someone wishes to keep from the knowledge of third parties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The w...orld is an attempt to make the best of Heaven and Hell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I began to expand my personal service in the church, and to search more diligently for a closer relationship with God among my dif...ferent business, professional and political interests.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of mainta...ining the professional standing of the critic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »