It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a reporter. I don't know where I got the idea that it was a romantic calling.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.

The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.

TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.

I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air.

It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.

I can't say that I've changed anybody's life, ever, and that's the real work of the world, if you want a better society.

I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.

For a while there, I was a stringer. The expression comes from the old habit of stringing together the column inches that you had written. They'd measure it and pay you 10 cents an inch for your printed copy.

There is such a thing as a national conscience, and it can be touched.

Kids are always asked, What are you going to be when you grow up? I needed an answer. So instead of saying, a fireman, or a policeman, I said, a reporter.

When we become a really mature, grown-up, wise society, we will put teachers at the center of the community, where they belong. We don't honor them enough, we don't pay them enough.

I suppose I was a little bit of what would be called today a nerd. I didn't have girlfriends, and really I wasn't a very social boy.

I don't think one should ever come to my stage of life and have to look back and say, Gosh. I wish I hadn't spent all those years doing that job I was never really interested in.

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.

I used to think that driving, sleepless, ambitious labor was what you needed to succeed.

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.

Now that I look back on it, having retired from being a reporter, it was kind of romantic. It was a wonderful way to live one's life, just as I imagined it would be when I was 6 or 7.

When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me.

I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.

Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.

It's best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.

I'm not any kind of social reformer.

I think I'd have done better if I had been a little more relaxed-if I had not pressed quite so hard, if I'd not lost quite so much sleep.

I don't think I had a reputation as a hard worker, but inside I was always being eaten up by the pressures.

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

My parents encouraged me in everything I ever wanted to do.

We always take credit for the good and attribute the bad to fortune.

The first books I was interested in were all about baseball. But I can't think of one single book that changed my life in any way.

Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

When I was a little boy I used to borrow my father's hat, and make a press card to stick in the hat band. That was the way reporters were always portrayed in the movies.

The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.

In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.

I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.

Look for joy in your life; it's not always easy to find.

There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.

I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.

I didn't like the competitiveness of big-time journalism.

My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on, because she was so mad about its treatment of my father.

I didnt know what narcissism was until I beheld my own naricssus.

I used to think that driving sleepless ambitious labor was what you needed to succeed.

It takes an earthquake to remind us that we walk on the crust of an unfinished planet.