I didn’t like the competitiveness of big-time journalism.
I don’t think I had a reputation as a hard worker, but inside I was always being eaten up by the pressures.
I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air.
I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.
I wasn’t a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.
I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn’t have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of 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.
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.
TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn’t like what I did on the air.
In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.
My parents encouraged me in everything I ever wanted to do.
It’s best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.
I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don’t think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.
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.
Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people. They nourish and refresh us and provide a home for dazzling varieties of fish and wildlife and trees and plants of every sort. We are a nation rich in rivers.
When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I’d be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me.
When I was a little boy I used to borrow my father’s hat, and make a press card to stick in the hat band. That was the way reporters were always portrayed in the movies.
I used to think that driving, sleepless, ambitious labor was what you needed to succeed.
I suppose I was a little bit of what would be called today a nerd. I didn’t have girlfriends, and really I wasn’t a very social boy.
I could tell you which writer’s rhythms I am imitating. It’s not exactly plagiarism, it’s falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.