I would like to explore some side roads in life while I am still in good health and good spirits.

...Pomeranians speak only to Poodles and Poodles speak only to God.

The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.

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.

I can't say that I've changed anybody's life, ever, and that's the real work of the world, if you want a better society.

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.