“I always found strange comfort that the American propensity for mixing alcohol and firearms cut across racial, socioeconomic, and cultural divides, from rural redneck to ghetto gangbanger to skeet-shooting blue blood.”

“It's one thing to be threatened. It's quite another thing to be threatened in grammatically incorrect fashion. I felt like some basic right as a literate American had been violated.”

“I'm not saying it's simple to find and tell the truth. It takes a great deal of hard work, intellectual honesty, open-mindedness, and a willingness to keep listening to people even when your gut is telling you they're full of it. Then it involves drilling through the layers of one's cultural assumptions and prejudgments, all the way down to the mushy middle of all of us, where I believe there's a basic humanity that tells us what's right and what's wrong. If we as writers apply that code - without the anchors of agenda or ideology - we can lift our prose to something that can be called the truth. It's the very best of what journalism can and should be.”

“In the end, I just engaged in a staring contest with the wall. The wall kept winning, but I felt like I was gaining on it.”

“…through the years, I had come to realize a simple fact of reporting: if you approach people with respect, listen hard, and genuinely try to understand their point of view, they will talk to you, no matter how different your background is.”

“What the hell happened to you?" she demanded. "What took so long?""My car got towed.""Okay, but why did you swim here?""I walked. It just happens to be a hundred and fifty-seven degrees outside.”

“No way you can get stuck. Your head is much smaller. Look at this big coconut of mine. It's practically Jupiter. Yours is more like, I don't know, Mercury or something.""That doesn't mean I'm going along with an idea that you're pulling out of Uranus."We both stopped to snicker. Hard to resist a Uranus joke.”