Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.

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

Now that I look back on it, having retired from being a reporter, it was kind of romantic. It was a wonderful way to live one's life, just as I imagined it would be when I was 6 or 7.

The first books I was interested in were all about baseball. But I can't think of one single book that changed my life in any way.

What you need for breakfast, they say in East Tennessee, is a jug of good corn liquor, a thick steak and a hound dog. Then you feed the steak to the dog.

There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass

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.