I never drove a car. I'm hopeless that way. I press the wrong buttons on the tape recorder. But if the person I'm interviewing helps me out, that person feels needed. People need to feel needed.

How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.

I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be.

We are living in the United States of Alzheimer's. A whole country has lost its memory. When it can't remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be.

Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.

Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.

I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.

More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.

If you possess the character that you have in your daily lives, nobody can't forcefully change your personality unless you embrace their influence.

You know enough of me to believe me when I say I am not going anywhere. Not without you. You stay, I stay. You’re not a fling, Amelia. For me, you are the reason to stop running.

It is the missed opportunity that counts, and in a love that vainly yearns from behind prison bars you have perchance the love supreme.

One must dare to be happy.

I see God as a song-and-dance man. If I had my way, he'd be able to carry a tune, too. Preferably, one of mine.

Any method of evangelism will work—if God is in it.

When a tiger changes his nature, Englishmen will change theirs.

I don't really want to direct myself, but I'm certainly torn in that direction.

Human experience throughout the ages has been enhanced through learning, information and communication.

Do you know that drawing with words is also an art... ?