Bill James Quotes

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Bill James

Profession : Writer

Birth : October 5, 1949

Crime stories show us the part of people's lives they try to keep hidden.

Bill James

Some people give themselves over to their most evil desires, and those people becomes evil. But in general, it's reductive to think of evil as something foreign and separate from the rest of us. Evil is part of everyone. We all have the capacity to commit evil acts.

Bill James

The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.

Bill James

There are many things that you can't measure. But the great fun of what I do for a living is figuring out ways to measure things that people previously considered intangible.

Bill James

Baseball does become slow sometimes. It's totally unnecessary. The - you can play baseball fast. You can play it slow, and for some reason, we have chosen to play it slow, you know, which is unfortunate, but nothing you can do about.

Bill James

If a candidate for office starts talking about thinning the deer population or investing in barriers to reduce the number of deer on the highways, the other side will probably just ignore him, because they're not going to know what to say about it. But there is a chance that the issue will resonate with voters in an unexpected way.

Bill James

When people disagree with you, what you ultimately have to do is persuade people to agree with you - period.

Bill James

You can't ultimately dodge defeat by winning close elections.

Bill James

When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.

Bill James

Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened.

Bill James

It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.

Bill James

I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were.

Bill James

If you go to a party populated by the NPR crowd and you start talking about JonBenet Ramsey, people will look at you as if you had forgotten your pants.

Bill James

None of us are claiming that the statistical analysts understand the game of football as well as the football coaches do, or that our analysis should take precedence over the informed opinions of experts. I'm not saying that at all.

Bill James

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

Bill James

I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.

Bill James

The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork.

Bill James

Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius. We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills - better than we are, really, at almost anything else. We are quite good at developing and rewarding inventiveness.

Bill James

We don't genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.

Bill James

We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day - fudging just a little on the definition of the word 'need.' We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes.

Bill James