“Golf is assuredly a mystifying game. It would seem that if a person has hit a golf ball correctly a thousand times, he should be able to duplicate the performance at will. But such is certainly not the case.”

I have never felt so lonely as on a golf course in the midst of a championship with thousands of people around, especially when things began to go wrong and the crowds started wandering away.

Golf is the one game I know which becomes more and more difficult the longer one plays it.

The difference between a sand trap and water hazard is the difference between a car crash and an airplane crash. You have a chance of recovering from a car crash.

Nobody ever wins the National Open. Somebody loses it.

One reason golf is such an exasperating game is that a thing we learned is so easily forgotten, and we find ourselves struggling year after year with faults we had discovered and corrected time and again.

Rhythm and timing are the two things which we all must have, yet no one knows how to teach either.

I think that (Alister) MacKenzie and I managed to work as a completely sympathetic team. Of course there was never any question that he was the architect and I was the advisor and consultant.

Doesn’t it show us all that we are silly little boys or fatuous asses to think that we can play golf without making a lot of bad shots?

Jack Nicklaus is playing an entirely different game, and one which I’m not even familiar with.

Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course… the space between your ears.

Too much ambition is a bad thing to have in a bunker.

Addressing a golf ball would seem to be a simple matter; that is, to the uninitiated who cannot appreciate that a golf ball can hold more terrors than a spacious auditorium packed with people.

As I see it, the thing that hurt my putting most when it was bad, was thinking too much about how I was making the stroke and not enough about getting the ball in the hole.

It is nevertheless a game of considerable passion, either of the explosive type, or that which burns inwardly and sears the soul.

Nobody ever swung a club too slowly.

It’s just a matter of hitting the ball where I want to hit it and hopefully making some putts.

I had no knowledge of the various steps involved in the game balls and the process that happened between when they were prepared and went to the officials and went to the game. So, I’ve learned a lot about that.

Most people don’t deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as Chaplin or Lucille Ball.

Everything I did that required effort, I opened my mouth. Even to catch a ball, I opened my mouth.

But the truth is that L.A. was never entirely real anyway, as Steely Dan, Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, Larry David and Alan Ball all understood.

The Croatians don’t play well without the ball.

Ball points belong to their age. They make everyone write alike.

I think of myself as ‘catching’ the ball with my bat and letting the pitcher supply the power.