But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years . . . I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

Like most men, Jimmy Jim was neither all good nor all bad. It is just that when he was bad, gentler people saw in him a disturbing fury. People, a lot them, don't understand fury. They understand anger and even hatred, but fury is one of those old words that have gone out of style. Jimmy Jim Bundrum understood it. It rode his shoulder like a parrot.

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.

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.

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be.

You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.