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.

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

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.

I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.

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.

Look for joy in your life; it's not always easy to find.

For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself. So they were always about somebody I like, 'cause if I didn't like him, I just didn't do the story. And to have somebody else paying the bills for this tourism, to every corner of every stage, over and over again? Why, who wouldn't want a job like that?