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.

A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.

The emblem on the necktie reserved for the members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews - The Vatican of golf - is of St. Andrew himself bearing the slatier cross on which, once he was captured at Patras, he was to be stretched before he was crucified.Only the Scots would have thought of celebrating a national game with the figure of a tortured saint.

Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.

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.

As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later

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.