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

Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper.

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.

To the goggling unbeliever Texans say, as people always say about their mangier dishes, 'But it's just like chicken, only tenderer.' Rattlesnake is, in fact, just like chicken - only tougher.

Las Vegas is Everymans cut-rate Babylon. Not far away there is, or was, a roadside lunch counter and over it a sign proclaiming in three words that a Roman emperors orgy is now a democratic institution. 'Topless Pizza Lunch'.

New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.

It rose slowly like a gull sensing a reckless blue fish to close to the surface, and then it dived relentlessly for the green, kicked and stopped three feet short of the flag.