I gained a great appreciation for what I would call the collective achievement of the country. I began thinking of America as a much more just and humane place than I would have thought if I'd been covering the civil rights struggle.

There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass

I used to think that driving, sleepless, ambitious labor was what you needed to succeed.

New York is the true City of Light in any season.

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.

There is such a thing as a national conscience, and it can be touched.

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.