It wasn't that I had gotten it right . . . but that I had gotten true..

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It ….

It is a common condition of being poor...you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, beca….

And Sandy Martindale ... dated Elvis before the rhinestone jumpsuits and the drugs, when he was sharp and cool and jagged, like porcelain that has be….

These were people... who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow funny. People of t….

Momma kept a garden, which sounds romantic to people who have never held a hoe.

When you're a sportswriter, you learn how to use your imagination and to flex your literary muscle, because it's the same game played over and over a….

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ….

Like most men, Jimmy Jim was neither all good nor all bad. It is just that when he was bad, gentler people saw in him a disturbing fury. People, a lo….

Don’t worry about what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who do….

The Haitians, who knew something about suffering and survival, had a beautiful phrase... The Translation is not perfect, but the nut of it was: 'The ….

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the fl….

I believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats..

It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your sock drawer, so you could touch it again..

I began reading Harper Lee's novel in the skimpy shade of a pine outside my grandmother's house, fat beagles pressing against me, begging for attenti….

It is easy to be liked when the world has no jagged edges, when life is electric blankets and peach ice cream. But to be beloved, a man needs a drago….

I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded ….

Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it..

Passion is something you really don't miss, after it has cooled. It is like looking at an empty bottle on the side of the road and thinking, "Boy, I ….

People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant..

You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot….