I don't know how one would define an affirmative-action hire. I ultimately do not know what role race played in my hiring.

I am making amends and seeking forgiveness. My only hope is that some good can come out of my situation.

When we report stories, we don't just want to talk to people who did the right thing. We want to talk to people who did the wrong thing.

If they're all so brilliant and I'm such an affirmative-action hire, how come they didn't catch me?

I believe my own demons would have caught up with me regardless of my race and regardless of whether I worked at 'The Times.

I used to walk around saying that I'm just another black man without a college degree.

I think people can learn from my experience - you know, any young people who are under pressure, whether you work on Wall Street or you work in a factory in Alabama, and young journalists.

It's hard to say what role race really played in my case.

I seek to be authentic and engaging, using my own experiences, being as vulnerable as I ask my clients to be, to enhance the process.

I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism.

Once I had a better beat, I needed to have an even better one. And somewhere in that climbing, I lost sight of, sort of, my moral and ethical underpinnings.

Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.

I want to board a train, and leave my books behind. I want to be so caught up in writing about the journey, that I forget that fiction & fact are not the same. The destination does not signify.

You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.

That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show.

It is not your sin - it is your moderation that cries to heaven; your very sparingness in sin cries to heaven!

Thanking people is dangerous business. A name always slips your mind.

I'm more authoritarian with the orchestras than I used to be. You need to hold your ground, I've noticed, or you'll be swept aside.

I don't do the whole L.A. nightlife thing.

Crime and violence are the easiest emotions to reenact.

I just know once you're over your emotional outbursts, you'll come up with-' I mean if we even had a wheelbarrow, that would be something,' Westley said.