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

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?

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.

Nobody ever swung a club too slowly.

From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting. . . . On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain.

We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange.

People want to know about the details of politicians, what they like doing in their spare time, about their families. I think that’s human.

Few men have been admired of their familiars.

However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some ‘Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.’

The wind can be quite extreme in England. We are not familiar with that in Germany, and you have to keep things simple.

Women are about the best lovers of nature, after all; at least of nature in her milder and more familiar forms.

Things are changing at such a rate that you really can’t get too familiar with anything that you own in relation to what sort of functionality it has in your life.