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My father was and is a great journalist. Thirty years ago, I was studying broadcasting in college, and the problem was I wasn't nearly as good as my father. I wasn't as quick or as smart as my old man, and I realized it would be a long time before I was ever going to be, and I decided to do something else.

My father was a journalist.

Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid - my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people.

When I was 26 or 27, I gave up journalism. I came to England after my mom died, to let serendipity take its course. And I just found myself back in journalism again.

Probably the biggest influence on my career was the late John Hersey, who, while he was at 'The New Yorker,' wrote one of the masterpieces of narrative non-fiction, 'Hiroshima.' Hersey was a teacher of mine at Yale, and a friend. He got me to see the possibility of journalism not just as a business but as an art form.

I got into journalism because I came of age in the '60s. It just seemed one way for me to get things done.

I always wanted to be some kind of writer or newspaper reporter. But after college... I did other things.

I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise.

I used to be a journalist.

For many years I was engaged in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper.