"I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing"
"In college, I got interested in news because the world was coming apart. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's right movement. That focused my radio ambitions toward news"
"I grew up on a farm, and we didn't have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn't inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it"
"That's the problem with news interviews, you work your tail off to get prominent figures in the news on the radio, but once they've been on, the event passes, the urgency, the issues you talked about evaporate"
"The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet"
"As a horn player, the greatest compliment one can get is when a person comes to you and says, 'I heard this saxophone on the radio the other day and I knew it was you. I don't know the song, but I know it was you on sax.'"
"In those days, boxing was very glamorous and romantic. You listened to fights on the radio, and a good announcer made it seem like a contest between gladiators"
"We began intercepting Japanese radio transmissions, which indicated the two forces were very close to each other. We found out later that we were moving in opposite directions and passed each other by 32 miles"
"It wasn't glamorous in my day. In the regions, reporters were seen as such low life that they didn't merit their name in the Radio Times. Now people are interested in being famous. I never gave it a thought"
