I like narrative, and I ultimately am in love with the men and women I write about, most of them..

I think California is playing a game of brinkmanship that's very dangerous. Why is it 50 or 60 years ago we had the capacity to lay down the physical….

I don't reverberate to victimhood, probably because of my own life. I refused to become a victim myself, so it's not one of my big stories..

I always thought the women of my age group got short shrift because the women's liberation movement came slightly after. You look at the yearbooks an….

A city where everyone seemed to live in a bungalow on a broad avenue lined with palm, pepper or eucalyptus trees, where there was never any snow..

It's highly competitive to be here. People don't come to California to drop out anymore. It's a very striving place..

If the Pilgrims had landed in Santa Monica Bay rather than Boston, we'd have six states out here!.

In the luxuriance of a bowl of grapes set out in ritual display, in a bottle of wine, the soil and sunshine of California reached millions for whom t….

I believe that's a form of dangerous stereotyping, to ascribe permanent victimhood to any group. Groups have suffered powerful injustice, and yet whe….

The Irish didn't read and write for a couple of thousand years, and I think we developed good memories and recall. We have a sense of the revelatory ….

I've always tried to write California history as American history. The paradox is that New England history is by definition national history, Mid-Atl….

In our public life, California is on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country..