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

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 dragon.

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

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

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 real writers. That's ridiculous.

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

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, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

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 wish I had a Coke. The loves you miss are the ones that go away when they are still warm, even hot, to the touch.

And Sandy Martindale ... dated Elvis before the rhinestone jumpsuits and the drugs, when he was sharp and cool and jagged, like porcelain that has been hurled against a wall.

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

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

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 don’t love you will, too.

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 by editors for 'working magic.

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.