There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass.
I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.
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.
I did stories about unexpected encounters, back roads, small towns and ordinary folk, sometimes doing something a little extraordinary.
And still I wander, seeking compensation in unforseen encounters and unexpected sights, in sunsets, storms and passing fancies.
You know, most reporters can’t go back to the towns they wrote stories about. I never wrote that kind of story.
The storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don’t know where it arose, but it’s still there. You can’t go to the feed store, or the country courthouse without running into storytellers.
I’m not knocking the wholesale grocery business or any other, but there is a kind of romance in journalism which some people, the lucky ones, feel inside them all their lives.
I was on the high school track team, believe it or not, and played baseball, poorly but passionately.
I think the feature reporter often walks a very thin line between a truly human story and one that slops over into mushiness or sentimentality.
I much preferred the peaceful life on the road, where I didn’t have to ask embarrassing questions and do all the things real reporters have to do.
I made friends with a lot of those who could have criticized me in print and who didn’t, who praised me instead.
I had a tight stomach all the time. I actually developed ulcers. I’ve learned better than to put all that internal pressure on myself.
I gained a great appreciation for what I would call the collective achievement of the country. I began thinking of America as a much more just and humane place than I would have thought if I’d been covering the civil rights struggle.
I don’t know what makes a good feature story. I’ve always assumed that if it was a story that interested or amused me, that it would have the same impact on other people.
I didn’t have the ambition to be a broadcaster. I was going to be a newspaper reporter the rest of my life, but that opportunity came along.
What I learned on the road. Above all else – to love my native land.
The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a reporter. I don’t know where I got the idea that it was a romantic calling.
There is such a thing as a national conscience, and it can be touched.