I think the feature reporter often walks a very thin line between a truly human story and one that slops over into mushiness or sentimentality.

Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.

I didn't know what narcissism was until I beheld my own naricssus.

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.

I'm not knocking the wholesale grocery business or any other, but there is a kind of romance in journalism which some people, the lucky ones, feel inside them all their lives.

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.

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