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

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

As happens with people who love a thing too much, it destroys them. Oscar Wilde said, 'You destroy the thing that you love.' It's the other way around. What you love destroys you.

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

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

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.

My favorite monologue in the book is Kate Harrington's story of her relationship with Truman.