“Nobody ever swung a club too slowly.”

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.

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 go to dance clubs…about once a year just to justify the other 364 days I spend in my apartment going ‘God, what idiots!’

If I can sell out clubs and theaters and play dirtbags in movies, and get blown up in a car or get the crap beat out of me in a movie, that’s good for me; I’m good.

I can see myself staying at Blackburn for the rest of my career – unless I move to another club at some stage

I don’t want to go to Portsmouth or any other club that has no ambitions.

I’d rather be shot than be seen falling out of some trendy club.

Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.

There are times when a golfer is tempted to throw her clubs away and forget the whole ‘humblin’ business.’ At other times, she wouldn’t trade places with a queen-that’s when the shots are long and true, and putts are dropping.

I didn’t mind working in the clubs, but I resented it being a club where pimps hang out. Because the music that I create is of a higher intellect than that. It not only encompasses pimps, but whores, ballplayers, executives… everybody.