It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your sock drawer, so you could touch it again.

It is a common condition of being poor...you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

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.

I made some friends for life, the way I usually make them. Any jackass can be pleasant company, but if people help you when you're at your worst, that's a friend.

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.

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