"Avedon was amazed by my hair. He kept pulling little pieces of my hair out and you see them sticking out in the picture. He had just the week before photographed the Cirque de Soleil."

“I’ve known [San Diego's] Oakley for going on 30 years. One thing he taught me was how to conduct myself as a writer. which is to say, ’Never to be jealous, never to be envious, never to be spiteful.'"

“On one visit, Milosz came off the plane and wanted to tell me about The Maverick Poets, published by Gorilla Press in San Diego. He recited from ‘Notice’ by Steve Kowit, who edited the book.

The English press follows Amis like Roseanne. Londoners know that Martin’s brother endures stunning depression, that his sister is a drunk, that Sir Kingsley can’t be left alone a minute.

I asked about Ginsberg. “Ginsberg,” Jan said, “has turned out to be a real hypocrite.. At the Beat Conference last year in May, he would come up to me and say, ‘How are you feeling, my dear?’"

“What’s developed since, are ‘personality bunnies,’ items as Willy Wacket, a hollow bunny with a tennis ball and tennis racket. There’s Dapper Dan, a hollow milk chocolate fellow who wears a pink candy top hat.”

Mr. Ledgerwood said that he’d been eating a lot of carrots and spinach lately. “I used to suffer a lot from arthritis, and now I’m just as clean as can be. It is a surprise to me.

McCarthy said she felt sorry for Hitler who “was so absurd as to want the love of his victims.”. Arendt, offended, replied, “How can you say such a thing in front of me — a victim of Hitler!”

I would have thought that if rhubarb had any family, it would have been cousin to celery; rhubarb blades look like celery dyed red. But rhubarb is a member of the buckwheat family.

“The people we sell them to are by and large people from Southeast San Diego, black people. They are connoisseurs of sweet potatoes. Most of them grew up in the South, and it was part of their diet.”

“Oh, my gosh, look at all this food!” And, “I always look forward to Mrs. Cummer’s lovely pea-and-baby-onion salad!” and “I can’t help but want more than my share of Mrs. Gibbons’ cheddar biscuits!”

I was afraid Sarah hated me, afraid that my relationship with my mother would duplicate itself. Hadn’t my mother disapproved this second child, hadn’t she said, “How can you take care of two?” with the emphasis on “you”?

Grasses indigenous to North America did not produce good lawn; they were rough after cutting and green only during the growing season.

Europeans considered wild rabbit’s flavor far superior to domesticated; hare they found tastiest of all (and beginning in the Middle Ages, hare’s blood was one of the apothecary’s most important ingredients).

“’Fraid of nothing,” Ernest Hemingway’s mother recorded his saying when he was a toddler. Hemingway sought out wars in Italy, Spain, China, and France. He followed the bulls in Spain and hunted lion in Africa. …

French and Americans have put millions of dollars into research that would develop a mechanical asparagus harvester. “Technologists have yet to find a replacement for the skilled hands of the experienced Filipino.”

I calculate menu combinations. I consider flavors, colors, textures, and what, that season, the market offers. I ask myself, “What if John drinks too much and chokes on a tiny bone in the bluefish?”

When we asked about salt-rising bread at the several bakeries in our town (most of whose stock was doughnuts, sweet rolls, and birthday cakes), no one recalled ever having made or eaten this bread.

Then came the scary part: combining the egg-sugar mix with the hot rice and milk. Why this always scares me is if the rice and milk are over 150 degrees F, the eggs may curdle.

Dobson’s chef, Deborah MacDonald Schneider, doesn’t make giblet gravy. She says that she “wouldn’t eat the giblets at gunpoint.” But Schneider does make a turkey gravy and was kind enough to type out her recipe.

"Most of the beets we eat in California are carried home in cans. Probably no more than a couple hundred acres of beets are growing in all the state. It’s a very neglected item."

Even though my own parents were long divorced; even though Joanna’s mother and father, spoke tensely to one another; I believed I would belong to my husband in a way I could never belong to myself.

Colin Wyatt suggests I talk with his colleague at Petoseed, Paul Thomas. Thomas is best known as breeder of gardeners’ now 30-year-old favorite, Better Boy. He also developed the tomato marketed locally as the San Diego Hybrid.

Ted Kennedy, now 61, is an arrested development beau ideal. Cause, in Teddy’s case, has never led, necessarily, to effect. He’s escaped visible consequences. He’s kept his Senate seat for 30 years. He’s not even …

Unlike 1984, when Ronald Reagan made it a point to finish his campaign at a giant rally in the parking lot of Fashion Valley, George Bush came to see the All-Star game and was booed by the locals.

A common approach to getting through holidays is reading one after another off-the-rack crime novels. You’re hardly caring what’s on the page, anxious only not to be left alone with your own terrible thoughts. You …

When I closed my mother’s old purses, I loved the clasp’s satisfying snap. I loved knowing everything I’d put in would be leading its own mute life in the silky darkness and would be there, waiting.

Born, he says, “a right-wing kook” in Bakersfield in1924, Franklyn Curran Nofziger attended Canoga Park High School, where he worked on the school paper and quit the paper over a difference in political opinion with …

So palpably painful was their parting that even above the bus’s noisy idle and squawking children, it seemed that anyone who passed by could hear the break between mother and child. I did.

My father loved Mary’s chicken pie, and she was fixing us one for dinner. To make the pie, she had to start out by stewing what she called “an old hen.” The hens arrived headless.

"Donald Trump told me the other night at a United Cerebral Palsy gala, 'Baby, you look beautiful!''" And, "'Hair is what life is all about,' says my delicious friend Nancy Collins of Prime Time Live."

After he came home following World War II, Cheever regularly began to keep a journal. Perhaps, living again with his wife and children, he needed a space where he could maintain, even hide, a private life.

Go deep. Make believe you're writing to someone you love who has only six months, or three, to live. Risk sentiment. Offer hope. Go down deeper. Make believe you have only six months, or three, to live.

"We are the only Streicher's store that has charge accounts. All our stores used to. We have them because we have so many customers in Mexico. Those customers could not use their credit cards outside Mexico.”

"What makes this court unique is that were dealing with people who haven't committed crimes, they're ill, ” said Paul Parris, acting that day as bailiff for mental health court, held in Department 14 in …

Canned goods were to dinner what poetry was to prose and pickled beets one of the prettiest canning products. The bright red pigments bleed out a rich wine red into the pickling liquid.

Stretching east of 30th Street, the Mid-City mesa has for decades been a Gasoline Alley wasteland of car washes, card parlors, dinky pink bungalows: low-rent neighborhoods whose obscurity is secured by distance from freeway off-ramps.

Early Saturday morning, five women and four children share seats on the San Ysidro trolley. The children sit primly, staring out windows at the emptied weekend city slipping by. Three women are black, one is …

From 1881 until her death, Jekyll was the premier influence on English gardeners, coaxing them to eschew the elaborately formal Italian and French garden models in favor of "cottage gardens on a country house scale."

Bulging stained manila file folders spewing yellow legal pads hugged to his chest, pin-striped charcoal suit coat over-large on his narrow shoulders, curly gray-streaked brown hair neatly caught up in a ponytail, Alex Landon slips …

l tell you again that I shall always consider you to be something more than a simple dealer in Corots, that through my mediation you have your part in the actual production of some canvases, …

In a March 1989 interview with the Reader, John explained the move to La Jolla: “We were doing movies. We wanted to be close to Hollywood but not in L.A.” The two-story La Jolla Shores house overlooked the ocean.

They relieve themselves on floors, set fire to drapes, smear walls with excrement, toss drawers and dishes and mirrors out windows, break windows, are blasting the 2 Live Crew or Barbra Streisand or Brahms’s Third …

"People will ask me, ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ and I’ll say, ‘Yes, I have a brother and I have a sister, but I don’t know if she’s dead or alive.’ ”

I have stretched out on the couch — a plumpish well-lit haven upholstered with rough, nubby cotton, ivory in color. In the kitchen the man I love shuts and opens and shuts the oven door. …

In fall, Coburn noted, changes are going on above and below ground. Soil temperature is lower. I touched the crumbly dirt onto the fig leaves had fallen and thought it felt cool.

The courtroom door swings open. The eyes of the family of Julio Hernandez (felony case number 107301) lock on the tall man - tie swinging, jacket flying - who veers toward them. Never quite breaking …

Stevens barked, “Put your hands up in the air.” Cripdown brought up his arms. “Step away from the vehicle.” Cripdown took two sideways steps away from the Cadillac. “Slowly turn in a circle.”

In a La Jolla oceanfront hotel, an elderly anorexic alcoholic picked at tiny oysters bedded in spinach and told me the story of her life. Orphaned at 8, married at 18 — “Married well!” She …

"Mandela isn't a hero to me. Ever'body equates us —black Americans —with Africa people, but I don't equate myself with those people because I don't know anything about them. . My people, the Alabama people, was Blackfoot Indians."