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.

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.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

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."

It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.

Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.

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.