I read the book [My Life by Bill Clinton] completely. And I think it compares very favorably with Ulysses S. Grant's gold standard of presidential autobiographies.

Journalism is not a precise science, it's a crude art

The great lesson my mother and father gave me was almost invisible. It was a strong sense of being rooted.

You'd better do what you feel good about doing. If we [try] to figure out what it is the audience wants and then try to deliver it to them, we're lost souls on the ghost ship forever.

Covering the civil-rights movement was a mind- and eye-opener for me. Houston was a segregated society, as was Texas as a whole - some of it by law, a lot of it by fear and tradition. But there was no violence where I lived, and if there was hate, it was either concealed from me or I just didn't recognize it.

I've always tried to be fair, even-handed, not an advocate for any group.

What separated Ed Murrow from the rest of the pack was courage.