It's like people always say, Well, does sport teach you anything in life? It teaches you certain things, but it doesn't teach you other things. It doesn't teach, as I say, very much about marriage, very much about how to make a living, any of those things.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

I never understood people who don't have bookshelves.

Golf cannot be played in anger, or in any mood of emotiional excess. Half the golf balls struck by amateurs are hit if not in rage surely in bewilderment, or gloom, or in cynicism, or even hysterically - all of those emotional excesses must be contained by the professional. Which is why balance is one of the essential ingredients of golf. Professionals invariably trudge phlegmatically around the course - whatever emotions are seething within - with the grim yet placid and bored look of cowpokes, slack-bodied in their saddles, who have been tending the same herd for two months.

The New York Times published the guest list on the front page. The masks were a brilliant concept.

Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else.

He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.