Alistair Cooke Quotes
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People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.
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I talk to my typewriter and that is what I've been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.
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To get an elementary grasp of the game of golf, a human must learn, by endless practice, a continuous and subtle series of highly unnatural movements, involving about sixty-four muscles, that result in a seemingly natural swing, taking two seconds to begin and end.
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Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.
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There is even - as with no other game - a fascinating detective literature, a wry commentary on the human comedy, implicit in the book of rules.
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In the best of times, our days are numbered anyway. So it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place: the opportunity to do good work, to enjoy friends, to fall in love, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby.
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These humiliations are the essence of the game.
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When that happens [the demise of golf], old men will furtively beckon to their sons and, like fugitives from the guillotine recalling the elegant orgies at the court of Louis XV, will recite the glories of Portmarnock and Merion, of the Road Hole at St. Andrews, the sixth at Seminole, the eighteenth at Pebble Beach. They will take out this volume from its secret hiding place and they will say: "There is no question, son, that these were unholy places in an evil age. Unfortunately, I had a whale of a time."
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Sir Guy Campbell's classic account of the formation of the links, beginning with Genesis and moving step by step to the thrilling arrival of 'tilth' on the fingers of coastal land, suggests that such notable features of our planet as dinosaurs, the prairies, the Himalayas, the seagull, the female of the species herself, were accidental by-products of the Almighty's preoccupation with the creation of the Old Course at St. Andrews.
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Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.
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A professional is a person who can do his best at a time when he doesn't particularly feel like it
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Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
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Like a christening, a wedding, a graduation ceremony, a holy war, a revolutioneven?a fireworksdisplay, agaudy promise of what life ought to be, not life itself.
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They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.
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Authors are now marketed like promising movie starlets and must rattle around the nation's television stations to try to assert a salable identity different from that of the other starlets.
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Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.
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No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.
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I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.
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In golf, humiliations are the essence of the game.