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.Collection: Dating
Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.Collection: Travel
The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Society
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.Collection: Romantic
You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.Collection: Society
The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Romantic
Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.Collection: Best
Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.Collection: Chance
A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Morning
I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.Collection: Communication
There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.
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.
Kids are always asked, What are you going to be when you grow up? I needed an answer. So instead of saying, a fireman, or a policeman, I said, a reporter.
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.
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.
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 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.
It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.
It's best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.
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.
I don't think I had a reputation as a hard worker, but inside I was always being eaten up by the pressures.
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.
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.
I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.
I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.
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.
I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.
In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.
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.
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.
TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.
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.
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.
You can't travel the back roads very long without discovering a multitude of gentle people doing good for others with no expectation of gain or recognition. The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines. Some people out there spend their whole lives selflessly.Collection: Kindness
There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grassCollection: Wind
What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well, or the bell, or the stone walls, or the crisp October nights or the memory of dogwoods blooming. Our loyalty is not only to William Richardson Davie though we are proud of what he did 200 years ago today. Nor even to Dean Smith, though we are proud of what he did last March. No, our love for this place is based on the fact that it is as it was meant to be, the University of the people.Collection: Loyalty
What I learned on the road. Above all else - to love my native land.Collection: Land
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!Collection: Girl