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

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

That was the overwhelming thing to me, the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it.

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.

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.

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

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