Some hard guys came to town after the war. A big ex-con with the cold eyes of a killer drove in from Kansas City. He parked in front of a white stucco house in Kensington. …

"There is practically a love relationship between me and Anna Swir. Though we were not lovers at all, but it is sort of by empathy I feel her body, so to say.”

San Diegans awaken on the Friday morning of March 21, 1952, to clear skies, northeasterly winds, highs in the 60s promised by afternoon. Harry Truman is president. Ex-Navy pilot and ex-San Diego State football star …

Bob Guthrie, in the summer of 1941, got a job driving a truck. He had graduated from Point Loma High School in 1940 and gone on to State. His job was a summer job. He …

“You have to get it all in a historic context,’ Mr. Willis said. “The Italianos, or Sicilianos, began to come here to America back around 1870. The main group on the West Coast came to …

"I had just moved to the house in Ithaca. I was driving back to the old rental. On the way over it occurred to me there wasn’t a yearly ‘best of’ book devoted to American poetry."

“Raymond Carver used to teach here [Syracuse University],” said Wolff in a recent telephone interview, “and I came because of him. It was meant to be a year, but we’ve stayed nearly 17."

RIGHT OFF, no sooner than five minutes after we stepped onto Pioneer Park’s green lawn, we met up with an elderly black-and-tan fellow gone white at the muzzle and sporting a red-and-white stripped Dr. Seuss …

“I was in Mississippi a number of years ago when an infamous former Klansman was arrested for a murder that took place in the 1960s. I was bothered at the time by the unanswered question….”

“Through most of my childhood he was in the grocery business, which meant he wasn’t home a lot. And I left home after high school. So I thought I didn’t have enough to write about.”

I said that unlike many historians of Bloomsbury, Mr. Bell treats Lady Ottoline with great kindness in his account of her. “Ah, I couldn’t do otherwise because she was very good to me really.”

"I took the wrong turn in New Jersey and got under the Pulaski Skyway instead of on it. I finally had to call Mr. Shawn from a pay phone to say I was going to be late."

One of us said that if you gave it a French name, people happily would eat dog food. No sooner was this thought spoken than Reginald and I were throwing on coats and heading to Safeway.

I didn’t say anything. For two reasons. One was that my mother hated “emotional displays,” and the other was that how I really felt was that I was glad it was Penny dead and not me.

"The serial killer has become our debased, condemned, yet eerily glorified Noble Savage, the vestiges of the frontier spirit, the American isolato cruising interstate highways in van or pickup truck.”

I remember breakfast tables from my earliest childhood; sunshine spills across a blue-checked tablecloth stiff with starch and fresh air. Cut-glass bowls hold jelly and jam. The Concord grape and strawberry wriggle, seem to live …

"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.”