Rick Bragg

“It is true that almost everyone in the foothills farmed and hunted, so there were no breadlines, no men holding signs that…

— Rick Bragg

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

— Rick Bragg

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower…

— Rick Bragg

You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had…

— Rick Bragg

“I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But…

— Rick Bragg

It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your…

— Rick Bragg

“One: Don't kill yourself. Two: Don't kill each other. Three: Try hard not to kill nobody else, but if you have to,…

— Rick Bragg

I began reading Harper Lee's novel in the skimpy shade of a pine outside my grandmother's house, fat beagles pressing against me,…

— Rick Bragg

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

— Rick Bragg

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

— Rick Bragg

“I write late into the night at the Tutweiler in downtown Birmingham, and try hard to turn down that second cheeseburger at…

— Rick Bragg

There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their…

— Rick Bragg

“You can dream on welfare. You can hope as you take in ironing. It is just less painful if you don't.”

— Rick Bragg

And Sandy Martindale ... dated Elvis before the rhinestone jumpsuits and the drugs, when he was sharp and cool and jagged, like…

— Rick Bragg

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

— Rick Bragg

“That is where a big part of the Old South is, on coffee tables in Greenwich Village.”

— Rick Bragg

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights…

— Rick Bragg

“West Virginia is among the nation’s leaders in military service, in killed in action, in medals for valor.”

— Rick Bragg

“I could not even ask myself how in the fuzzy hell I got here, because I knew precisely how it happened, year…

— Rick Bragg

“But I just stood there, trapped somewhere between my long-standing comfortable hatred, and what might have been forgiveness. I am trapped there…

— Rick Bragg

“If you cannot eat what you want in the South, life is not worth living.”

— Rick Bragg

“These were people who remembered the weight of the cotton sack, people with grease under their fingernails that no amount of Octagon…

— Rick Bragg

Like most men, Jimmy Jim was neither all good nor all bad. It is just that when he was bad, gentler people…

— Rick Bragg

These were people... who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow…

— Rick Bragg

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

— Rick Bragg