Lester Holt

“Everyone knows I'm black. I am who I am. This is the person that Lester Sr. and June Holt raised, and I make no apology for it. At the same time, I'm never going to pull a race card to get what I want. You can't have it both ways.”

“What I've come to know is that in life, it's not always the questions we ask, but rather our ability to hear the answers that truly enriches our understanding. Never, never stop learning.”

“Sometimes, I'll be flipping the channel at home and think, 'Wow, there's a lot of me on TV.'”

“You never know what doors are going to open up and why they are going to open up. You've got to be ready to walk through them.”

“For 30 years I've been schooled in everything from government, and economics, to medicine and international relations. But don't be impressed. Someone once said being a general assignment reporter simply means you are equally ignorant about most everything. In other words, I know a little about a lot.”

“I have a couple of basses in my office. And I try to be courteous of my co-workers, but sometimes I get carried away and I crank up my amp and I rock out. It's kind of my stress reliever.”

“As a 13, - 14-year-old kid, I'd sit on my bed with a tape recorder and a newspaper. I would do my own newscast. I would practice my diction.”

“The one thing I don't consume during 'Today' - which surprises many people - is coffee. I find that a lot of water helps wake me up, without the buzz. I love coffee, but usually reserve a double espresso as an afternoon pick-me-up before settling in to do the weekend 'Nightly News.'”

“A lot of times we work across multiple platforms. We'll go to Japan working on the tsunami for 'Nightly News' and it'll end up on 'Dateline.'”

“I never believed the anchorman should be the know-it-all. And I try to communicate that to the audience. While I have some knowledge from my years of experience, what I want to do is walk you through this because we're all walking through this together.”

“I'm not terribly athletic. And... there's a lot of things I'm not good at. And if it makes anybody feel better, I was really a pretty bad math student growing up.”

“The issues of the day have never seemed more complicated, and yet the conversations over how to solve them increasingly resemble cars passing down a divided highway. Whizzing by without a glance.”

“You know there's some great folks, great story telling at 'Dateline,' and I'm glad to be a part of it.”