You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.
Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.
Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.
I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.
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 mu...
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.
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 everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.
The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.
I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.
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.
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.
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.