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'm not any kind of social reformer.

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.

You never heard anybody ask 'Elvis who?'

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

There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.

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.