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

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

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.

These were people... who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow funny. People of the pines. My people.

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

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.