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.

You never heard anybody ask 'Elvis who?'

I had a tight stomach all the time. I actually developed ulcers. I've learned better than to put all that internal pressure on myself.

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

I didn't like the competitiveness of big-time journalism.

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.

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