America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.

The Scots say that Nature itself dictated that golf should be played by the seashore. Rather, the Scots saw in the eroded sea coasts a cheap battleground on which they could whip their fellow men in a game based on the Calvinist doctrine that man is meant to suffer here below and never more than when he goes out to enjoy himself.

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.

Americans are less mystical about what produced their inland or meadow courses; they are the product of the bulldozerm rotary ploughs, mowers, sprinkler systems and alarmingly generous wads of folding money.

No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

I believe Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.