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.

For a while there, I was a stringer. The expression comes from the old habit of stringing together the column inches that you had written. They'd measure it and pay you 10 cents an inch for your printed copy.

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

The first books I was interested in were all about baseball. But I can't think of one single book that changed my life in any way.

I didn't have the ambition to be a broadcaster. I was going to be a newspaper reporter the rest of my life, but that opportunity came along.

It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.

TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.