Alistair Cooke Quotes
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These humiliations are the essence of the game.
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More than anything else, though, to anyone who would write about it, golf offers a four-hour drama in two acts, which becomes memorable even in the tape-recorded reminiscenses of old champs, and which - in the hands of someone like Herb Wind - can become a piece of war correspondence as artfully controlled as Alan Morehead's account of Gallipoli.
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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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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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Texas does not, like any other region, simply have indigenous dishes. It proclaims them. It congratulates you, on your arrival, at having escaped from the slop pails of the other 49 states.
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The South is one of those kingdoms of the mind, like India or Scotland, that are neat and understandable only to people who have never been there.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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In golf, humiliations are the essence of the game.
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I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.
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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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Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.