Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

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 don't think I had a reputation as a hard worker, but inside I was always being eaten up by the pressures.

Often I have been exhausted on trout streams, uncomfortable, wet, cold, briar scarred, sunburned, mosquito bitten, but never, with a fly rod in my hand have I been less than in a place that was less than beautiful.

There is such a thing as a national conscience, and it can be touched.

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

What I learned on the road. Above all else - to love my native land.