Amateur Quotes

When should a college athlete turn pro? Not until he has earned all he can in college as an amateur. ~ Will Rogers

Rembrandt was way ahead of his time. It's as if he was painting an amateur theatrical, or a professional theatrical, in his studio. It's a kind of performance. ~ Peter Schjeldahl

It's as if they've planned out my life for me and I'm expected to live it for them. I hate it. So I don't tell anyone much. It's easier that way." ~Dani O'Meara from the forthcoming amateur sleuth mystery, Dangerous Days for Dani ~ Claire A. Murray

An amateur is anyone who hasn't learned how not to do it,' I said. ~ Gregory David Roberts

When I was a kid at four years old, that's when I started amateur wrestling with my dad and family. And when that's instilled in you, it never goes away. ~ Dwayne Johnson

Lately, because computer technology has made self-publishing an easier and less expensive venture, I'm getting a lot of review copies of amateur books by writers who would be better advised to hone their craft before committing it to print. The best thing you can do as a beginning writer is to write, write, write - and read, read, read. Concentrating on publication prematurely is a mistake. You don't pick up a violin and expect to play Carnegie Hall within the year - yet somehow people forget that writing also requires technical skills that need to be learned, practiced, honed. If I had a dollar for every person I've met who thought, with no prior experience, they could sit down and write a novel and instantly win awards and make their living as a writer, I'd be a rich woman today. It's unrealistic, and it's also mildly insulting to professional writers who have worked hard to perfect their craft. Of course, then you hear stories about people like J.K. Rowling, who did sit down with no prior experience and write a worldwide best-seller...but such people are as rare as hen's teeth. Every day I work with talented, accomplished writers who have many novels in print and awards to their name and who are 'still' struggling to make a living. The thing I often find myself wanting to say to new writers is: Write because you love writing, learn your craft, be patient, and be realistic. Anais Nin said about writing, "It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it bre ~ Terri Windling

In the mid-1970s, there was this huge boom of stand-up comedy throughout North America. I went to see a show at a club called Yuk-Yuks, in Toronto, and I was just fascinated. I ended up coming back for amateur hour on a Monday at midnight and got up there without any thought as to what might come of it. ~ Howie Mandel

We do not overidentify with our jobs. We may take pride in our work, we may stay late and come in on weekends, but we recognize that we are not our job descriptions. The amateur, on the other hand, overidentifies with his avocation, his artistic aspiration. He defines himself by it. He is a musician, a painter, a playwright. Resistance loves this. Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him. ~ Steven Pressfield

Not only is Cinderella Castle the symbol of the Magic Kingdom, it is also the most photographed item by amateur photographers in the entire world. ~ Brent Dodge

There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business. ~ Ethel Waters

But as an amateur, the highest level you can box at is the Olympics. I did that at 18 and felt it was time to move on to other challenges as a professional. ~ Billy Joe Saunders

Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell these details to the driver. As I believe I told you before, I am a busy man."
"I'd like to keep communications to one channel. It makes it clear where the responsibility lies."
"Responsibility?"
"In other words, say the cat dies while I'm gone, you'd get nothing out of me, even if I did find the sheep."
"Hmm," said the man. "Fair enough. You are somewhat off base, but you do quite well for an amateur. I shall write this down, so please speak slowly. ~ Haruki Murakami

I don't think anyone's particularly conscious of thinking suits are the thing, but when you see a comedian on stage in jeans and a t-shirt it doesn't matter how good they are - it always looks like amateur hour when they walk onto the stage. ~ Jack Dee

We are governed by what you find in the bottom of dead beer glasses that whores have dunked their cigarettes in. The place has not even been swept out yet and they have an amateur pianist beating on the box ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure. ~ Steven Pressfield

It is a misfortune of the times that all of us must needs be amateur economists-including, and perhaps especially, the professionals. ~ Benjamin Graham

That such lowly beginnings would soon become one of the world's strongest dictatorships is beyond fantastic. Lenin was essentially a pamphleteer. In 1918 he was identified as "Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and journalist," and earned more money from publication honoraria (15,000 rubles) than from his salary (10,000 rubles).17 Trotsky was a writer as well, and a grandiloquent orator, but similarly without experience or training in statecraft. Sverdlov was something of an amateur forger, thanks to his father's engraving craft, and a crack political organizer but hardly an experienced policy maker. Stalin was also an organizer, a rabble-rouser, and, briefly, a bandit, but primarily a periodicals editor - commissar of nationalities was effectively his first regular employment since his brief stint as a teenage Tiflis weatherman. Now, ~ Stephen Kotkin

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading. ~ Alan Greenspan

Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey−fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean−mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy. ~ George Orwell

I think it's important to present yourself as a professional. While writing a good book is critical, nothing will cancel that out faster than behaving like an amateur. I cringe every time I see an author arguing with a reader who left a poor review, or fighting with their friends on Facebook … or publicly bashing their agents or publishers. ~ Alistair Cross

He is a musical man, an Amateur, but might've been a Professional. He is an Artist, too; an Amateur, but might've been a Professional. He is a man of attainments and of captivating manners. ~ Charles Dickens

The sure sign of an amateur is he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow. ~ Steven Pressfield

The first thing he taught me was how to make love.
Before you laugh, know that I'd always hated that phrase. It sounded so corny, so old. Hippies made love. People my mom's age, though I preferred to believe I was an immaculate conception.
People my age hooked up, fucked, had sex. We didn't attach frilly ideas of oneness and eternity to a basic biological act. Most of us were from single-parent homes. Those who weren't wished they were when their parents screamed and beat the shit out of each other. We grew up sexualized, from toddler beauty pageants to the constant reminder that adults were waiting to lure us into vans with candy. The invention of MMS gave us a platform for the distribution of amateur porn.
That's a lot of conditioning to break through. ~ Leah Raeder

Though she teased at explanations of sorcery in both her life and in her art (an early dust-flap biography called her "a practicing amateur witch," and ~ Shirley Jackson

In every bio-region, one of the most urgent tasks is to rebuild the community of naturalists - so radically depleted in recent years, as young people have spent less time in nature, and higher education has placed less value on such disciplines as zoology ... ... The times are right for the return of the amateur, twenty-first-century, citizen naturalist. To be a citizen naturalist is to take personal action, to both protect and participate in nature. ~ Richard Louv

Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger's girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop's baby daughter has a pain in her head that won't go away. And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don't ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife's breast. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.

Perhaps they are. I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G.Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it's so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G.Q.'s thesis that pro ball-players - little as some of them may want to hear it - are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working ~ David James Duncan

Any chance I had to get in front of people - amateur talent contests at movie houses like the Broadway, the president - I took. ~ Frankie Avalon

When you don't know what to believe, when you're not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands of the truth or of the whole tangled mess - which comes to the same thing. The truth is never clear, it's always a tangled mess. Even when you get to the bottom of it. But in real life almost no one needs to find the truth or devote himself to investigating anything, that only happens in puerile novels. ~ Javier Marias

To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.

Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It's definitely possible to write a book in a month, leave it unedited, and watch it go off into the world and be declared a masterpiece. It happens every fifty years or so.

For the rest of us, the single greatest ally we have is time. There's no page of prose in existence that its author can't improve after it's been in a drawer for a week. The same is true on the macro level – every time I finish a story or a book, I try to put it away and forget it for as long as I can. When I return, its problems are often so obvious and easy to fix that I'm amazed I ever struggled with them.

Amateur writers are usually desperate to be published, as soon as possible. And I understand that feeling – you just want it to start, your career, your next book, whatever. But I wonder how many self-published novels might have had a chance at getting bought, and finding more readers, if their authors had a bit more patience with them? ~ Charles Finch

You have noticed, I hope, that man is the only amateur animal; all the other are professionals. ~ C.S. Lewis

Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put. ~ Marshall McLuhan

When people buy, rescue, or otherwise acquire a dog from unscrupulous breeders or amateur rescue groups, they are making a decision with ethical consequences. They have a profound responsibility to consider their actions; to gauge the dog's behavior, to train it thoroughly and rigorously, to protect other humans and dogs from harm. ~ Jon Katz

Difference between a professional and amateur is like a difference between your dominant hand and non-dominant hand. ~ Amit Kalantri

Every expert was once an amateur. ~ Jeekeshen Chinnappen

I had 12 years under my belt of baseball at the amateur level before I got to the big leagues. ~ Tom Seaver

(an early dust-flap biography called her "a practicing amateur witch, ~ Shirley Jackson

I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper. ~ Dave Eggers

Never tell the truth about an amateur show. ~ Leslie McFarlane

The professionals resemble and recognize each other by virtue of the stigmata that their trade has left upon them. They are like the dog in the fable, whose collar has made an indelible mark around his neck. The amateur is the shaggy wolf whom no dog had better trust too far. ~ Jacques Barzun

Amateur," Kavinsky said. "This is the way to dream back Gansey's balls for him."
"Is this going to be a thing?" Ronan demanded. He was angry, but not as angry as he would've been before he started drinking. He put his fingers on the door handle, ready to get out. "Like, is this going to be what's funny to you? Because I don't want this that bad. I can figure it out myself."
"Sure you can," Kavinsky said. He cocked a finger at him. "Give him that pen. Write him a little note with it. In fucking George Washington letters, 'Dear Dick, drive this, ex-oh-ex-oh. Ronan Lynch. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Golf is a lot like sex. It's something you can enjoy all your life. And if you remain an amateur, you get to pick your own playing partners. ~ Jess Sweetser

Technically perfect, pictorially rotten. (Stieglitz's standard comment on photographs he rejected for publication in The American Amateur Photographer.) ~ Alfred Stieglitz

To keep from going stale you must forget your professional outlook and rediscover the virginal eye of the amateur. ~ Brassai

You could use a moth like that as a symbol in a novel, but it was trite, wasn't it? The old moth-to-the-flame image had been used and used again. It was the stuff of amateur poetry. And she, having so little experience crafting a story, would be the most in danger of falling into trite approaches. If she wrote a novel, it probably would be about her father. And the male Luna moth would haunt its pages. Everyone would recognize the work as that of a first novelist. "She wrote about herself through the lens of her father."
The really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just the littlest bit. ~ L.L. Barkat

Writing for the sake of writing, writing that draws its credibility from its very existence, is a foreign idea to most Americans. As a culture, we want cash on the barrel head. We want writing to earn dollars and sense so that it makes sense to us. We have a conviction - which is naive and misplaced - that being published has to do with being "good" while not being published has to do with being "amateur." ...
"Did you write today?"
"Yes."
"Then you're a writer today."
It would be lovely if being a writer were a permanent state that we could attain to. It's not, or if it is, the permanence comes posthumously.
A page at a time, a day at a time, is the way we must live our writing lives. Credibility lies in the act of writing. That is where the dignity is. That is where the final "credit" must come from. ~ Julia Cameron

I still regard myself as an amateur today and I hope that's what I'll stay until the end of my life. Because I'm forever a beginner who discovers the world again and again. ~ Andre Kertesz

I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn't want conversation, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing matches. I didn't understand t.v. I felt foolish paying money to go into a movie theatre and sit with other people to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateur drunks, the bores. ~ Charles Bukowski

Nevertheless, if I have at times been able to make original contributions in the accelerator field, I cannot help feeling that to a certain extent my slightly amateur approach in physics, combined with much practical experience, was an asset. ~ Simon Van Der Meer

Although I'm a comedian, I'm also an amateur survivalist. ~ Nick Kroll

A sort of insatiability seems to infect our feelings when we look back on women, particularly on those who are highly interesting and yet whose effort at self-definition through works is fitful, casual, that of an amateur. We are inclined to think they could have done more, that we can make retroactive demands upon them for a greater degree of independence and authenticity. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

We feel more emotion ... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history. ~ Chris Marker

Self-Exam

Dear audience, please stand if you were raised
By a terrible mother. Okay, okay,

Approximately half of you. So I'd say
That terrible mothers are commonplace.

Just like terrible fathers. So let's mourn
For the children who never knew childhood.

Our grief is justified. Our anger is good.
I won't blame children for childish scorn.

But there comes a day when a broken child
Becomes an adult. On that day, you'll need

To choose between the domestic and wild.
You'll need to escalate war or declare peace.

I tell you this because I'm the kid, mother-stung,
Who became a terrible adult son.

And I'm to blame for that. I made that mess.
Because I am the Amateur of Forgiveness. ~ Sherman Alexie

All too frequently the amateur will purchase a fine modern camera and proceed to use it for making the most elementary simple snapshots. This surely is like playing 'Chopsticks' on a concert grand piano. ~ Sam Haskins

Every week, as an 11-year-old kid, I would tune in to what was really the first American Idol-type program, a radio show called 'Major Bowes' Amateur Hour.' The winning group on the evening of September 8, 1935, was called the Hoboken Four, and their spokesman was Frank Sinatra, then aged 19. ~ Tony Bennett

(A note: succubi are notorious amateur psychologists and have been since well before Freud. In fact I have it on good authority that Freud stole his whole gig from a particularly talkative succubus he used to know. And if you don't believe Freud knew a succubus, you haven't read Freud.) ~ Gene Doucette

I'm a writer. An amateur photographer. An actor. ~ Ben Affleck

He wrote to his father every day. His platoon called his dad a girlfriend. ~ Noorilhuda

I am essentially an amateur medecin, and this to me is almost a mania. ~ Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

I would hate to think I am not an amature. An amateur is one who loves what he is doing. Very often, I'm afraid, the professional hates what he is doing. So, I'd rather be an amateur. ~ Yehudi Menuhin

My parents say it all began with my role of Percy the Polar Bear back in nursery school! I began dance classes at the age of five (you would never guess though) and then I went on to join my local theatre group, Glantawe Players, at the age of eight and then Swansea Amateur Dramatics Society. I then joined the National Youth Music Theatre, so I really can't remember a time when I wasn't interested in Musical Theatre! ~ Francesca Jackson

I think the greatest photographers are the amateur photographers who do it because they love it. Arnold Newman is a good example; he is a consummate professional, but he's also an 'amateur' in the pure sense of the word. ~ John Sexton

It always amazes me that just when I think there's nothing left to do in photography and that all permutations and possibilities have been exhausted, someone comes along and puts the medium to new use, and makes it his or her own, yanks it out of this kind of amateur status, and makes it as profound and as moving and as formally interesting as any other medium. ~ Chuck Close

Politics is that rare sport where the amateur contest is actually more interesting than the professional. ~ Lawrence Lessig

First time I met Jack [Nicholas ] I had heard about his golf and prowess - I was playing in the Ohio amateur. ~ Arnold Palmer

Women in mystery fiction were largely confined to little old lady snoops - amateur sleuths - who are nurses, teachers, whatever. ~ Marcia Muller

The amateur tweets. The pro works. ~ Steven Pressfield

A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. ~ Athanasius Of Alexandria

I'm still an amateur, of course, but I became rugby's first millionaire five years ago. ~ David Campese

I was always into noir. When I lived in Vermont I was drawing stuff that looked like an amateur doing Sin City. When I first got to New York I was swiftly informed that they only did guys in tights. ~ Frank Miller

Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble. ~ Peter S. Jennison

I wouldn't swap the era I competed in for anything, not a day of it. I started out as an amateur, and people like myself, Seb Coe, Steve Ovett, Steve Cram, Tessa Sanderson and the rest did it for the glory of winning medals for our country. ~ Daley Thompson

No one is so modest as not to believe himself a competent amateur sleuth ... ~ Isaac Asimov

A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it; an amateur is one who can't when he does feel like it. ~ James Agate

Firmness in all aspects is a most important quality when gardening, not only in planting but in pruning, dividing and tying up. Plants are like babies, they know when an amateur is handling them. ~ Margery Fish

But what I liked in Aberdeen was what I liked generally in Britain: the bread, the fish, the cheese, the flower gardens, the apples. the clouds, the newspapers, the beer, the wollen cloth, the radio programmes, the parks, the Indian restaurants and amateur dramatics, the postal service, the fresh vegetables, the trains, and the modesty and truthfulness of people. ~ Paul Theroux

Scrubbing away the last bit of the painting - her own amateur portrait - Cinder stepped back to join him. The ship no longer looked like the Rampion she'd come to think of as home. It no longer looked like the stolen ship of Captain Carswell Thorne.
She swallowed the lump in her throat.
All around her, strangers were helping to gather up the painting supplies, scrubbing paint off one another's faces, pausing to take enormous drinks of water, and smiling. Smiling because they'd spent the morning together, accomplishing something. ~ Marissa Meyer

Camera phones threaten to turn everyone into amateur paparazzi. We are witnessing our personal space shrink because of the way technology is being used. ~ Daniel J. Solove

You may be an expert in environmental protection policy, but when it comes to science, you're an amateur. How much do you actually know about undersea resource development? If you truly want to come up with a solution that allows both, you'll need to have the same amount of knowledge and experience with both. It's arrogant to think that knowing only one is sufficient. Only by respecting the other side's work and way of thinking can you open a path for compromise. ~ Keigo Higashino

Despite being an amateur (or perhaps because of it), whenever I listen to music, I do so without preconceptions, simply opening my ears to the more wonderful passages and physically taking them in. When those wonderful passages are there, I feel joy, and when some parts are not so wonderful, I listen with a touch of regret. Beyond that, I might pause to think about what makes a certain passage wonderful or not so wonderful, but other musical elements are not that important to me. Basically, I believe that music exists to make people happy. In order to do so, those who make music use a wide range of techniques and methods which, in all their complexity, fascinate me in the simplest possible way. ~ Haruki Murakami

Vampire Slayer," I grumbled, "Try killing a god sometime and then get back to me. Blondie wouldn't last a day. She'd be whining to her mommy about the unfairness of it all within minutes. Oh, and falling for your prey... total amateur. You don't poop where you eat and you don't kill where you sleep. Or sleep with who you kill. No wait, that's necrophilia," I frowned and then shook my head. "Oh whatever, it's just dumb to let your prey seduce you. ~ Amy Sumida

A great photographer show off his talent & awards on facebook.
An amateur photographer show off his work and skill on facebook.
A foolgrapher show off his camera and how he holds it, on facebook. ~ Junior Ming

Mr Pett, receiving her cold glance squarely between the eyes, felt as if he were being disembowelled by a clumsy amateur. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

In other words, we want to believe that Mark Spitz was born to swim in a way that none of us were and that none of us could. We don't want to sit on the pool deck and watch him progress from amateur to expert. We prefer our excellence fully formed. We prefer mystery to mundanity. ~ Angela Duckworth

I would say I am an amateur guitarist. ~ Rain Phoenix

So long as you're not a snap, you're safe. (Nykyrian)
Snap…Syn used that term. (Kiara)
Single. Naïve. Amateur. Person. (Nykyrian) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I can only surmise about what Liebling would make of today's pugilistic dark ages. In his era, fighters fought rematches of close fights, even title fights, almost automatically. Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta met six times, inconceivable for champions today. In the 1950s a quality pro thought himself underemployed if he had only eight or ten bouts a year, and the amateur scene was thriving. Nowadays pros who make a living from boxing are about as common as Yetis, and amateurs can't get enough fights to learn the rudiments of the craft. ~ A.J. Liebling

The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits. We can never free ourselves from habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones. ~ Steven Pressfield

My father was an amateur filmmaker who shot 8mm color documentaries. ~ Lasse Hallstrom

The word amateur comes from the Latin root meaning "to love. ~ Steven Pressfield

The difference between and amateur and a professional.. a professional believes if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. An amateur believes if a job is worth doing, it very well may be worth doing badly. ~ Robert Littell

The careful scholarship of the dedicated amateur mycophile R. Gordon Wasson reads like an exciting scientific detective story. Moreover, his willingness to pursue the quest through the wide range of linguistics, archeology, folklore, philology, ethnobotany, plant ecology, human physiology, and prehistory constitutes an object lesson to all holistic professional students of man. ~ Weston La Barre

Those plates, with their amateur finishing, the slight lumpiness of the edges, would never be shown in the presence of guests in Nigeria. He still was not sure whether Emenike had become a person who believed that something was beautiful because it was handmade by poor people in a foreign country, or whether he had simply learned to pretend so. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Even now I want to keep my amateur spirit, to spend my time, to be in the sport with all my heart. ~ Sergei Bubka

The fact that I could secure an opera engagement made me realize I had within me the making of an artist, if I would really labor for such an end. When I became thoroughly convinced of this, I was transformed from an amateur into a professional in a single day. ~ Enrico Caruso

What the young writer needs to develop, to achieve his goal of becoming a great artist, is not a set of aesthetic laws but artistic mastery. He cannot hope to develop mastery all at once; it involves too much. But if he pursues his goal in the proper way, he can approach it much more rapidly than he would if he went at it hit-or-miss, and the more successful he is at each stage along the way, the swifter his progress is likely to be. Invariably when the beginning writer hands in a short story to his writing teacher, the story has many things about it that mark it as amateur. But almost as invariably, when the beginning writer deals with some particular, small problem, such as description of a setting, description of a character, or brief dialogue that has some definite purpose, the quality of the work approaches the professional. Having written some small thing very well, he begins to learn confidence. ~ John Gardner

Death by misadventure sounds like a hopeful possibility.
--Marjorie Branell-Markson ~ Jennifer A. Girardin

I'm not supposed to be able to speak clearly, and decipher what's going on in the media. I'm supposed to be the typical amateur who's 22 and scared to death and can't believe he won the Olympics. ~ Carl Lewis

I'm helpless in post-round, hole-by-hole interviews. I can't take you through most of the holes of winning the Players Championship, the U.S. Amateur or Ryder Cup matches. It's like golf amnesia. ~ Matt Kuchar

Here is New York. This is why I stay. I stay to hear the jazz musicians playing in the parks, and to browse the tables of books for sale on the street. I stay for a drink in a quiet bar, lit by golden autumn light, and for Film Forum double features in black and white. I stay for egg creams, for the amateur opera singers practicing with their windows open so we all can listen. For the Chinese grandmothers dancing by the East River, snapping red fans in their hands. For the music of shopkeepers throwing open their gates. I stay for the unexpected spectacle, and the chance encounter, and for those tough seagulls gliding inland on rainy days to remind us that Manhattan is an island, a potential space both separate and connected. Most of all, I stay because I need New York. I can't live anywhere else, so I hold on to what remains. We've lost a lot, but there's so much left worth fighting for. And while I stay, I fight. ~ Jeremiah Moss

In a field where else you found a stack
of revealing nature photographs, of supernude nature
photographs, split beaver of course nature photographs,
photographs full of 70s bush, nature taking come
from every man from miles around, nature with come back
to me just dripping from her lips. The stack came
up to your eye, you saw: nature is big into bloodplay,
nature is into extreme age play, nature does wild inter-
racial, nature she wants you to pee in her mouth, nature
is dead and nature is sleeping and still nature is on all fours,
a horse it fucks nature to death up in Oregon, nature is hot
young amateur redheads, the foxes are all in their holes
for the night, nature is hot old used-up cougars, nature
makes gaping fake-agony faces, nature is consensual dad-
on-daughter, nature is completely obsessed with twins,
nature doing specialty and nature doing niche, exotic females
they line up to drip for you, nature getting paddled as hard
as you can paddle her, oh a whitewater rapid with her ass
in the air, high snowy tail on display just everywhere. ~ Patricia Lockwood