“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.”

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.

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.

Nobody ever swung a club too slowly.

My ‘thing’ is that I just lie in my immense bed and look out the window at the skyline over Virginia and the sky and the airplanes coming into Reagan. I really love doing that.

Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.

The odds against there being a bomb on a plane are a million to one, and against two bombs a million times a million to one. Next time you fly, cut the odds and take a bomb.

When I listen to Airplanes record, it takes me back. I remember a lot of my thought processes when I was 20 or 21, writing those songs and recording that record.

Seeing someone reading something I wrote on an airplane – things like that are pretty awesome.

God forgives man the time spent looking at airplane photos.

I don’t want to talk about methods of killing. But what is the difference between a bomb worn on the body and one dropped from an airplane? Both of them kill people.

How do you think it would feel to be obliged to ask for a seat-belt extender on an airplane? For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations.