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The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.
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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.
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In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.
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The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.
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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.
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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.
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I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.
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Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.
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I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.
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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.
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TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.
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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.
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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.
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It's best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.
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You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.