I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers.

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

You never heard anybody ask 'Elvis who?'

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 didn't know what narcissism was until I beheld my own naricssus.

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

For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself. So they were always about somebody I like, 'cause if I didn't like him, I just didn't do the story. And to have somebody else paying the bills for this tourism, to every corner of every stage, over and over again? Why, who wouldn't want a job like that?