God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism.

It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination.

You're either on the bus or off the bus.

It's fortunate that I am a writer, because that has helped me understand the properties of words. They are what have made life complex. In the battle for status in the animal kingdom, power and aggressiveness have been all-important. But among humans, once they acquired speech, all that changed.

Television reporters aren't really called reporters. They are called researchers. And that's really all they are.

By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the 'real world.' So I started working for newspapers.

Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about.