Rick Bragg
Rick Bragg
Rick Braggis an American journalist and writer known for non-fiction books, especially those about his family in Alabama. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 recognizing his work at The New York Times...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMemoirist
Date of Birth26 July 1959
CountryUnited States of America
mother dream morning
I began reading Harper Lee's novel in the skimpy shade of a pine outside my grandmother's house, fat beagles pressing against me, begging for attention, ignored. At dark, I kept reading, first on the couch, a bologna sandwich in one hand, then in my bed, by the light of a 60-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling on an orange drop cord. When my mother came in from her job as a maid and unplugged my chandelier, I replayed the story in my head until it was crowded out by dreams. I woke the next morning, smelling biscuits, and reached for the book again.
dream hard-work people
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.
dream book ideas
But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years . . . I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.
send time unusual
It is not unusual to send someone to conduct an interview you don't have time to conduct. It's what we do.
thinking people ignorant
People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.
clerks assistants news
Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants.
writing phones editors
I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for 'working magic.
paper journalism backgrounds
The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.
It wasn't that I had gotten it right . . . but that I had gotten true.
beautiful pain nuts
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.
book writing thinking
I don't think there's a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book.
wall drug porcelain
And Sandy Martindale ... dated Elvis before the rhinestone jumpsuits and the drugs, when he was sharp and cool and jagged, like porcelain that has been hurled against a wall...
home remember moments
This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment.
real writing thinking
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.