“Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.”
“When I first talked about writing with Saul he insisted on the ability to change, to get a serious grip on what was real in your life, ... He was the 20th century's literary wizard, who fused the intellect and the imagination in glorious and comic language that we'd never heard before.”
“Four years ago, many banks were insolvent or close to it because they were loaded down with a lot of bad loans, ... This was a drag on the economy, but many banks have been forced to merge or close.”
“People don't know what price people paid to make America human. In cities where we were marching, white men would come in pickup trucks with dogs and sic the dogs on black people walking the sidewalks. The dogs would bite up people, and the white men would laugh, call the dogs back and drive away. You've never seen such meanness like the meanness we went through.”