George Plimpton quotes:

The New York Times published the guest list on the front page. The masks were a brilliant concept.

As happens with people who love a thing too much, it destroys them. Oscar Wilde said, 'You destroy the thing that you love.' It's the other way around. What you love destroys you.

My favorite monologue in the book is Kate Harrington's story of her relationship with Truman.

At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact.

Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else.

Rick Bass is one of the best writers of his generation.

You do not cut a check in the state of Kansas to John Doe, executioner. The executioner is paid in cash so there's no trail to him

The pleasure of sport was so often the chance to indulge the cessation of time itself--the pitcher dawdling on the mound, the skier poised at the top of a mountain trail, the basketball player with the rough skin of the ball against his palm preparing for a foul shot, the tennis player at set point over his opponent--all of them savoring a moment before committing themselves to action.

I remember being awed by it - the uniqueness and nicety of style - and I suspect I was a bit jealous because we were more or less of the same generation.

I never understood people who don't have bookshelves.

Art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Golf cannot be played in anger, or in any mood of emotiional excess. Half the golf balls struck by amateurs are hit if not in rage surely in bewilderment, or gloom, or in cynicism, or even hysterically - all of those emotional excesses must be contained by the professional. Which is why balance is one of the essential ingredients of golf. Professionals invariably trudge phlegmatically around the course - whatever emotions are seething within - with the grim yet placid and bored look of cowpokes, slack-bodied in their saddles, who have been tending the same herd for two months.

He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

It's like people always say, Well, does sport teach you anything in life? It teaches you certain things, but it doesn't teach you other things. It doesn't teach, as I say, very much about marriage, very much about how to make a living, any of those things.

The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book.

Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I'm sort of crazy baffoon who can't make up his mind what to do in life

I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.