I can't say that I've changed anybody's life, ever, and that's the real work of the world, if you want a better society.

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

It's best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.

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.

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.

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?

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