“Some days the competition would beat me and I'd go home thinking awful...” — Sam Donaldson Quote

Some days the competition would beat me and I'd go home thinking awful thoughts, want to hide under the bed, depressed. But of course, in the news business, when you're working a daily news broadcast, you get your victories and defeats every day.

But in 1941, on December 8th, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my mother bought a radio and we listened to the war news. We'd not had a radio up to that time. I was born in 1934, so I was seven years of age.

The questions don't do the damage. Only the answers do.

It wasn't until the late '70s that a lot of people knew me.

As I went to college, I went into radio and television. Now I suppose most people think that's one step ahead of basket weaving as a major in college, but it was part of the journalism department.

With 'SMTV' it was a very brave decision by ITV to commission it for a year. It was so awful to start with and the ratings were so low to start with we might never have made it past the first six months.

This game is full of rejection. As an actor, you are being told 'No' an awful lot of the time. You have to keep getting up and carrying on to get to where you want to go.

Back in the late '90s, I put together a humorous newsmagazine program called 'The Awful Truth' for Bravo. We helped one guy get an organ transplant whose insurance company had refused to pay. I thought, if we could save a guy's life in a 10-minute segment on cable, what could we do if we devoted a whole movie to a whole bunch of people?

I sweat an awful lot.