There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they're not re….

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background..

I made some friends for life, the way I usually make them. Any jackass can be pleasant company, but if people help you when you're at your worst, tha….

This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment..

I don't think there's a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book..

Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants..

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….

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..

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….

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….

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….

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 ….

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 ….

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

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….

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 ….

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….

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….

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

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….

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 ….