 Be prepared, work hard, and hope for a little luck. Recognize that the harder you work and the better prepared you are, the more luck you might have. |
| I will not go into a story unprepared. I will do my homework, and that's something I learned at an early age. |
| I made the decision to come back to New York, quit my job and move to Paris. |
| I taught sixth grade for three and a half years. |
| My mother worked in factories, worked as a domestic, worked in a restaurant, always had a second job. |
| And I always found that the harder I worked, the better my luck was, because I was prepared for that. |
| There was no one around me who didn't work hard. |
| Professionally, I remember Cronkite as a kid growing up, and more so for me, the importance of Cronkite was not him sitting there at the anchor desk, but him out there doing things. |
| Probably my mother. She was a very compassionate woman, and always kept me on my feet. And I think part of it is just the way you are, the way you're raised. And she had the responsibility for raising me. |
| You can work hard to sharpen your talent, to get better at whatever it is that you do, and I think that's what it comes back to. |
| I had a lot of fun in Cambodia, much more so in Cambodia than Vietnam. |
| The only thing I'd ever done with news was to read copy sitting at the microphone in the studio. |
| I'd watch my father get up at 5 o'clock and go down to the Eastern Market in Detroit to do the shopping for his restaurant, and get that business going and then go out on his vending machine business. |
| But you know, I always said that no one else on my block was on the radio, and it was fun. |
| So I just got on the phone and the engineer just patched me in and I did reports. I'd get a community leader and bring him to the phone, call up the station and do an interview over the phone with the guy. |
| I had no experience with broadcasting basketball games, so I took a tape recorder and went to a playground where there was a summer league, and I stood up in the top of the stands and I called the game. |
| And I realized that there was no sports reporter, so I started covering sporting events. |
| The Paris peace talks kept a roof over my head and food on the table and clothes on my back because if something was said going in or coming out, I had the rent for the month. |
| Then I learned how to do wraparounds and things like that. I had no experience. |
| I did anything that would get me on the air. |
