Quotes from Bill James

If you can't learn to do something well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.

I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.

The search for understanding, wherever it roams, is a search for better simplifications. Simplifications which explain more and distort less... All human understanding is based on simplifications of more complex realities.

He was called "Pancho" because people at that time didn't have enough sense to be offended by stuff like that.

What happens in many of these cases is that, in the absence of evidence, the crime is pinned on a person of low social standing who is known to be in the vicinity of the crime. We have seen this repeatedly.

And then you come to the 1910 to 1912 era, and . . . Jesus H. Christ, what is happening here? Axe murders start appearing like dandelions. Murdering your neighbors with an axe became the nation's fourth-largest sport.

I'm sort of a baseball agnostic; I make it a point never to believe anything just because it is widely known to be so.

He was who he was; it was how he thought about himself. He was the man with the secret that nobody could ever get to. You guys look at me and you see nothing- this is how he thought; you see a small and dirty man who doesn't amount to anything, but I know that I can do things and I have done things that you cannot imagine. I am the very Monster of whom you live in terror- and you have no idea that it is Me.

by refusing to make any moral judgment here, even the most modest one, people are missing something obvious about the time: that there was a revolutionary fervor in that era fueled not by racial injustice, as Doctorow presented it in Ragtime, but by hatred of the rich, which was fueled in turn by the fact that rich people

That said, Fatal Vision does have a major virtue. McGinniss is genuinely obsessed with his story … with that story. That's the flaw of the book; McGinniss is so obsessed with his material that he doesn't know when to shut up about it.

The Warren Court swung the balance of power toward the accused—and the counterbalance of skepticism moved the other way. Trials were once spontaneous, quick and dramatic; now they are rehearsed, endless and often boring, interminable bullshit from professional witnesses who have practiced their skills at sparring with defense attorneys. The jury looks upon the accused as if he must be guilty, or why would he be here?

Fatal Vision was a very successful book that a lot of people like, but the problem with it is that you could edit out 75% of the book without losing a single fact or insight.

This book is almost entirely about people who lived in small towns a hundred years ago. As much about how they died as about how they lived. But the flash of death illuminated the lifes the victims have lived.

The period from 1910 to 1912 was the era of the axe murderer. It is not a silly argument to say that this era came about because of The Man from the Train, that he was the man who spread the idea across the country. He was the Typhoid Mary of the Axe Murder Epidemic.

Skepticism in favor of a presumption of guilt when the facts do not support a finding of guilt is irrational skepticism. And irrational skepticism is the smoke screen behind which these murders have been hidden for a hundred years.

My wife makes 99% of the rules in our house, but one rule I insisted on, when the kids were small, is that I wasn't going to have "pets" in the house that aren't really pets. Fish, birds, cats, dogs… that's fine. No spiders, ferrets, snakes, gerbils, hamsters; if you would kill the thing if it came into the house on its own, that's not a pet.

There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve

One of the great rules of life is that we all establish 'policies', although we call them habits or preferences or beliefs or techniques, which are useful to us, but which we continue to use after the reason for them has evaporated. We have a hard time seeing things as they are because we can never get what they were out of our heads.

What happened in Prohibition? What happens to you when you put on a few pounds, and decide to get rid of them with a crash diet? What happened to the, ah, romantic content of movies after public criticism forced the adoption of a rating code? What happens to a daughter whose father forbids her to date? Unwanted efforts to apply a strict standard will almost always backfire, and bring about the very result which they seek to prevent.

blocking out the sunlight increases the ability of the lawyers to play with the shadows.

Chris Darden made a huge error in asking O.

Each one roars by us for a few days, is remarked upon in casual conversation and filed away as something less than a memory.

The capacity of mankind to misunderstand the world is without limit.

There comes a moment during a job interview when you're still talking, but you might as well take off your shoes.