Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.

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

I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.

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

I did stories about unexpected encounters, back roads, small towns and ordinary folk, sometimes doing something a little extraordinary.

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.

For a while there, I was a stringer. The expression comes from the old habit of stringing together the column inches that you had written. They'd measure it and pay you 10 cents an inch for your printed copy.