I never understood people who don't have bookshelves.

Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I’m sort of crazy baffoon who can’t make up his mind what to do in life

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.

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

At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact.

The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book.

I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.