What other sport holds out hope of improvement to a man or a woman over fifty? True, the pros begin to falter at around forty, but it is their putting nerves that go, not their swings. For a duffer like [me], the room for improvement is so vast that three lifetimes could be spent roaming the fiarways carving away at it, convinced that perfection lies just over the next rise. And that hope, perhaps, is the kindest bliss of all that golf bestows upon its devotees.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.