I was on the high school track team, believe it or not, and played baseball, poorly but passionately.

It's that enthusiasm, that passion for what you're doing, that is most important.

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.

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.

I did stories about unexpected encounters, back roads, small towns and ordinary folk, sometimes doing something a little extraordinary.

TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.

I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.