All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.

Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.

It's hard, Cotton. To let yourself love something you know you may never have.

I'm scattered, and then that last hundred pages, bam, I'm a laser.

It's my experience that most folk who ride trains could care less where they're going. For them it's the journey itself and the people they meet along the way. You see, at every stop this train makes, a little bit of America, a little bit of your country, gets on and says hello.

The real worth of a person came from how he acted during the bad times. (John Fiske)

But protagonists are protagonists and heroes are heroes.