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.
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.
In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.
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.
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 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.
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.
Look for joy in your life; it's not always easy to find.
I didn't like the competitiveness of big-time journalism.
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 would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.
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.
There is such a thing as a national conscience, and it can be touched.
Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.
My parents encouraged me in everything I ever wanted to do.
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.
We always take credit for the good and attribute the bad to fortune.
I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.
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.
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.
