New York is the true City of Light in any season.

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

You know, most reporters can't go back to the towns they wrote stories about. I never wrote that kind of story.

I have spent a good part of my life looking for the perfect barbecue. There is no point in looking in places like Texas, where they put some kind of ketchup on beef and call it barbecue. Barbecue is pork, which narrows the search to the South, and if it's really good pork barbecue you are looking for, to North Carolina.

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.

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

My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on, because she was so mad about its treatment of my father.