When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me.

America is a great story and there is a river on every page of it.

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a reporter. I don't know where I got the idea that it was a romantic calling.

Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

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.

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

What I learned on the road. Above all else - to love my native land.