Rick Bragg Quotes

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

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.

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.

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 believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats.

Momma kept a garden, which sounds romantic to people who have never held a hoe

This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment.

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.

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.

It is easy to be liked when the world has no jagged edges, when life is electric blankets and peach ice cream. But to be beloved, a man needs a dragon.

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.

There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they're not real writers. That's ridiculous.

And Sandy Martindale ... dated Elvis before the rhinestone jumpsuits and the drugs, when he was sharp and cool and jagged, like porcelain that has been hurled against a wall.

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.

I don't think there's a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book.

People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.

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

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

Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants.

The children start school now in August. They say it has to do with air-conditioning, but I know sadism when I see it.