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.

They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.

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.

Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.

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.

Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.

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.