There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass

In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.

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

I'm not any kind of social reformer.

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.

To read the papers and to listen to the news... one would think the country is in terrible trouble. You do not get that impression when you travel the back roads and the small towns do care about their country and wish it well.

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.