For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it.
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day’s progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
There’s a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can’t.
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
You cannot but learn more of the world’s heft, as you take it now into your hands.
Without rain, there would be no life.
Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
All blessings are mixed blessings.
There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.
The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today’s pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.