As if he were a man of a certain kind of secular faith,

He knew that in film there was power, and he was the man working the film, and he knew he was good at it.

There would be a very nice small book in it about another time and era in America, a kind of sweetness and friendship,

If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.

She was young and scared, and hadn't realized there was time to spare.

Late in his career, when the L.A. Times started pursuing him in its new incarnation during Watergate, it was one of the great 360-degree turnarounds.