The questions don't do the damage. Only the answers do.

I was a typical farm boy. I liked the farm. I enjoyed the things that you do on a farm, go down to the drainage ditch and fish, and look at the crawfish and pick a little cotton.

I don't know many people, if any, who have had some straight line toward success. I mean, they start here, they work hard, they've got what it takes, and they just go straight to the top over some number of years. Most people get a little failure.

And on election night I'd go down to city hall in El Paso, Texas and cover the election. In those days, of course, we didn't have exit polls. You didn't know who had won the election until they actually counted the votes. I thought that was exciting too.

I wanted to be in this business, and once I got into the business I knew I enjoyed it, and I liked it, and I wanted to continue, but I never had a five year plan.

If you have a setback, and you're not doing well and then you overcome it somehow, it always sticks with you. You know it could happen again.

You really get the most out of sweet corn if you pick the corn off the stalk and rush it to a pot of boiling water. The longer you wait, the more sugar you lose. But if you get it in the first half hour, that is the sweetest corn ever.

The truth is, when I got started in this business, it wasn't because I had a full understanding of the importance of the business, but because I thought it was fun. I found it exciting. It fulfilled me, whatever it was that I was looking for.

And from a military school which taught me that to fit into society, you can't just do anything you damn well please because it will suit you. And that it's much better to be with the winners than it is with the losers.

I can't tell you what that little ingredient is which makes that first person want to go on and aggressively do more, and the other person be content to not do that. It's a mystery, but it does happen.

Some days the competition would beat me and I'd go home thinking awful thoughts, want to hide under the bed, depressed. But of course, in the news business, when you're working a daily news broadcast, you get your victories and defeats every day.

But in 1941, on December 8th, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my mother bought a radio and we listened to the war news. We'd not had a radio up to that time. I was born in 1934, so I was seven years of age.

There was a little bit of ham in me. And there's a lot of people say there's a lot of ham in me.

My mother gave me a push. If I hadn't had her, maybe I wouldn't have had the push. If I hadn't gone to military school, maybe I wouldn't have decided to get with the program. Maybe I'd be running a bulldozer, rather than going on and doing something more.

My mother did all she could to control me, but at age 14 she sent me to a military school.

And really, the basis, I think, of achieving some success in what I want to do today comes from my mother's push to get me to read and to make something of myself from the standpoint of an education.

News conferences are the only chance the American public has to see Ronald Reagan use his mind.

It was kind of exciting being on the radio. Not everybody was on the radio.

But as a young kid, I never did, really have an ambition to be a farmer. I never thought, gee, I would like to farm, and I want to raise these crops. I didn't quite know what I wanted to do.

I didn't come east of the Mississippi for the first time in my life until I was 26 years of age, but I knew. I read magazines, I listened to radio, I watched television. I knew there was something out there, and I wanted a part of it.

As I went to college, I went into radio and television. Now I suppose most people think that's one step ahead of basket weaving as a major in college, but it was part of the journalism department.

Well, I was born in El Paso, Texas, it was in the nearest hospital to the family farm.

It wasn't until the late '70s that a lot of people knew me.

But I guess the lesson is this: If you don't have confidence in yourself and think that you are worth hiring, or whatever it is, you can't expect anyone else to.

But my observation has been, certainly in the news business, you've got to give 110 percent.

The questions don't do the damage. Only the answers do.

People don't want to be plagued by not knowing-they want answers.

If not for music, I would probably be a very frustrated scientist. It's one way to answer the question, 'What is the meaning of life?' I feel music answers it better.

I wish I knew at 14 not to put much thought into what other people my age said to me, cause we were all looking for the answers. So I wish I knew that other people really don't know any more than you do!

Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his work showed is that when the answers are simple too, then you can hear God thinking.

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.

To play a good guy is nice because in a way, he is so open for answers.

Some people think technology has the answers.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

Real answers need to be found in dialogue and interaction and, yes, our shared human condition. This means being open to one another instead of simply fighting to maintain a prescribed position.

This story, I predict, will grow to be worse than Watergate. The American people need to have the answers.

By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions.

I was asking Charlie the most important questions, and you heard the answers.

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

You need to make a commitment, and once you make it, then life will give you some answers.

I think it does suggest that the American people really do want to listen to somebody who actually has some solutions, some answers, and gives them some hope.

We don't know all the answers. If we knew all the answers we'd be bored, wouldn't we? We keep looking, searching, trying to get more knowledge.

That's where I began to ask questions that maybe don't have one specific answer. And the more people you get answers from, the richer the environment becomes.

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

There is no such thing as an unreasonable question, or a silly question, or a frivolous question, or a waste-of-time question. It's your life, and you've got to get these answers.

Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers - in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning.

When the media ask George W. Bush a question, he answers, 'Can I use a lifeline?'