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.
The reality of any place is what its people remember of it.
I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.
And still I wander, seeking compensation in unforseen encounters and unexpected sights, in sunsets, storms and passing fancies.
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 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.
You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.
To read the papers and to listen to the news... one would think the country is in terrible trouble. You do not get that impression when you travel the back roads and the small towns do care about their country and wish it well.
I have spent a good part of my life looking for the perfect barbecue. There is no point in looking in places like Texas, where they put some kind of ketchup on beef and call it barbecue. Barbecue is pork, which narrows the search to the South, and if it's really good pork barbecue you are looking for, to North Carolina.
You can find your way across this country using burger joint the way a navigatior uses stars....We have munched Bridge burgers in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and Cable burgers hard by the Golden Gate, Dixie burgers in the sunny South and Yankee Doodle burgers in the North....We had a Capitol Burger - guess where. And so help us, in the inner courtyard of the Pentagon, a Penta burger.
I made friends with a lot of those who could have criticized me in print and who didn't, who praised me instead.
A true Southerner will never say in 2-3 words what can better be said in 10-12.
My parents encouraged me in everything I ever wanted to do.
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 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 didn't know what narcissism was until I beheld my own naricssus.
Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.
...Pomeranians speak only to Poodles and Poodles speak only to God.
You know, most reporters can't go back to the towns they wrote stories about. I never wrote that kind of story.
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 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.
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.
It's best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.
TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did 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.
