“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.”
“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 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.”
“The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.”
“When we become a really mature, grown-up, wise society, we will put teachers at the center of the community, where they belong. We don't honor them enough, we don't pay them enough.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.”
“Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.”