The greatest thing you can do in life is to tell a young boy or girl that they're 'the very best' at something - baseball, reading, art. That gives them the wonderful feeling that they can do anything, which they can!

I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers.

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.

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 think I'd have done better if I had been a little more relaxed-if I had not pressed quite so hard, if I'd not lost quite so much sleep.

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

I much preferred the peaceful life on the road, where I didn't have to ask embarrassing questions and do all the things real reporters have to do.