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.

Rick Bass is one of the best writers of his generation.

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.

Art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

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