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.

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'm not knocking the wholesale grocery business or any other, but there is a kind of romance in journalism which some people, the lucky ones, feel inside them all their lives.

Often I have been exhausted on trout streams, uncomfortable, wet, cold, briar scarred, sunburned, mosquito bitten, but never, with a fly rod in my hand have I been less than in a place that was less than beautiful.

The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.

The storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don't know where it arose, but it's still there. You can't go to the feed store, or the country courthouse without running into storytellers.

It's that enthusiasm, that passion for what you're doing, that is most important.