I did stories about unexpected encounters, back roads, small towns and ordinary folk, sometimes doing something a little extraordinary.
Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.
I don’t think one should ever come to my stage of life and have to look back and say, Gosh. I wish I hadn’t spent all those years doing that job I was never really interested in.
The greatest thing you can do in life is to tell a young boy or girl that they’re ‘the very best’ at something – baseball, reading, art. That gives them the wonderful feeling that they can do anything, which they can!
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.
That was the overwhelming thing to me, the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it.
New York is the true City of Light in any season.
It takes an earthquake to remind us that we walk on the crust of an unfinished planet.
It’s that enthusiasm, that passion for what you’re doing, that is most important.
I think I’d have done better if I had been a little more relaxed-if I had not pressed quite so hard, if I’d not lost quite so much sleep.
My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family’s subscription to the newspaper I was working on, because she was so mad about its treatment of my father.
It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.
It was cold out there, bitter, biting, cutting, piercing, hyperborean, marmoreal cold, and there were all these Minnesotans running around outdoors, happy as lambs in the spring.
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.
A true Southerner will never say in 2-3 words what can better be said in 10-12.
America is a great story and there is a river on every page of it.
Most of those old settlers told it like it was, rough and rocky. They named their towns Rimrock, Rough Rock, Round Rock, and Wide Ruins, Skull Valley, Bitter Springs, Wolf Hole, Tombstone. It’s a tough country. The names of Arizona towns tell you all you need to know.
I’m not any kind of social reformer.
The sparrows are preparing for winter, each one dressed in a plain brown coat and singing a cheerful song.
I would like to explore some side roads in life while I am still in good health and good spirits.
Now that I look back on it, having retired from being a reporter, it was kind of romantic. It was a wonderful way to live one’s life, just as I imagined it would be when I was 6 or 7.