Charles Kuralt Quotes

A country so rich that it can send people to the moon still has hundreds of thousands of its citizens who can't read. That's terribly troubling to me.

For a while there, I was a stringer. The expression comes from the old habit of stringing together the column inches that you had written. They'd measure it and pay you 10 cents an inch for your printed copy.

Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a reporter. I don't know where I got the idea that it was a romantic calling.

I can't say that I've changed anybody's life, ever, and that's the real work of the world, if you want a better society.

I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.

I didn't like the competitiveness of big-time journalism.

I don't have any well-developed philosophy about journalism. Ultimately it is important in a society like this, so people can know about everything that goes wrong.

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

I suppose I was a little bit of what would be called today a nerd. I didn't have girlfriends, and really I wasn't a very social boy.

I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them.

I think I'd have done better if I had been a little more relaxed-if I had not pressed quite so hard, if I'd not lost quite so much sleep.

I used to think that driving, sleepless, ambitious labor was what you needed to succeed.

In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.

It does no harm just once in a while to acknowledge that the whole country isn't in flames, that there are people in the country besides politicians, entertainers, and criminals.

It's best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.

Look for joy in your life; it's not always easy to find.

My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on, because she was so mad about its treatment of my father.

Now that I look back on it, having retired from being a reporter, it was kind of romantic. It was a wonderful way to live one's life, just as I imagined it would be when I was 6 or 7.

Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.

The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.