A contest was held in 1994 to rename the Los Angeles Convention and Exhibition Center after an extensive renovation and expansion. The winning name, chosen from over ten thousand entries, was the Los Angeles Convention Center.

For years I supported capital punishment, but I have come to believe that our criminal justice system is incapable of adequately distinguishing between the innocent and guilty. It is reprehensible and immoral to gamble with life and death.

I always wanted to write a book about LA, a big ambitious book. Nobody had ever really done it with LA- treating the city seriously as a major economic and cultural power, as the embodiment of 21st century America.

In life we often look to others for simple, but difficult answers, despite the fact that we have those answers ourselves.

I felt like I had lost something. But not something silly, like my keys or my gum; more like my arm or my foot, something that really mattered. Like something that I could live without, but would make life much harder if it were missing. And life is hard enough. Life is hard enough with everything we're given.

On my first day in jail, a three hundred pound man named Porterhouse hit me in the back of the head with a metal tray. I was standing in line for lunch and I didn't see it coming. I went down. When I got up, I turned around and started throwing punches." (James Frey, pg.1)

I will not allow people to impose rules on me that don't make sense to me. And I live and work very much outside the literary world and the literary system. What they think and what they believe and what their rules are mean nothing to me.