You never heard anybody ask 'Elvis who?'

If there are bleachers in heaven and a warm sun, that's where you'll find Bill Veeck.

I made friends with a lot of those who could have criticized me in print and who didn't, who praised me instead.

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

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

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.