Quotes from Rick Bragg

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

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

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be.

Mama just stepped back on the treadmill of worry and hopeless, and kept walking.

The Haitians, who knew something about suffering and survival, had a beautiful phrase... The Translation is not perfect, but the nut of it was: 'The season of pain is never over until the sky begins to cry.

They, especially, taught me that you can't go through life not liking people because they didn't have to work as hard or come as far as you did.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It is not unusual to send someone to conduct an interview you don't have time to conduct. It's what we do.