Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.

In the year since we brought things into the open with a clean breath of fresh air at City Hall, we have learned about corrupt spending practices and unethical conflicts of interest that waste your money... and keep Dallas from being the great city of our dreams.

People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.

Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.

Now it's time to focus on basics for people in our neighborhoods... and real ethics reform at City Hall.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

We spend so much of our passion on our first love. I'm not convinced that it-passion-is one of those things that you have an endless amount of-like happiness or sadness. I could be happy all day. I could be sad all day. But I'm not so sure I'll ever love like that again.