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

- Kevin Starr

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

- Kevin Starr

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…

- Kevin Starr

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.

- Kevin Starr

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.

- Kevin Starr

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

- Kevin Starr

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

- Kevin Starr

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.

- Kevin Starr

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…

- Kevin Starr