Alistair Cooke Quotes

The best thing about Eisenhower's Presidency was his Jeffersonian conviction that there should be as little government and as much golf as possible.

People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.

It's an acting job - acting natural.

As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

The Masters is more like a vast Edwardian garden party than a golf tournament.

I believe Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.

Curiosity ... endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and a serenity in cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will.

If computers take over, it will serve us right.

I have an insane desire to shave a stroke or two off my handicap.

Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men.

I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.

Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.

Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.

Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.

New York is the biggest collection of villages in the world.

I talk to my typewriter and that is what I've been working on for 40 years-how to write for talking.

These humiliations are the essence of the game.

Cocktail music is accepted as audible wallpaper.

A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.

Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.

They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.

Every sport pretends to be literature. . .

The South is one of those kingdoms of the mind, like India or Scotland, that are neat and understandable only to people who have never been there.

Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.

There is even - as with no other game - a fascinating detective literature, a wry commentary on the human comedy, implicit in the book of rules.