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