I had a tight stomach all the time. I actually developed ulcers. I've learned better than to put all that internal pressure on myself.

Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.

That was the overwhelming thing to me, the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it.

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.

You never heard anybody ask 'Elvis who?'

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.