Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Kuralt

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.

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.

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

I'm not any kind of social reformer.

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 don't think I had a reputation as a hard worker, but inside I was always being eaten up by the pressures.

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.

When I was a little boy I used to borrow my father's hat, and make a press card to stick in the hat band. That was the way reporters were always portrayed in the movies.

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

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

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

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 wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.

There is such a thing as a national conscience, and it can be touched.

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

We always take credit for the good and attribute the bad to fortune.

There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.

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

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.

When I worked in Los Angeles covering hard news, very often when something important would happen I'd be off in the woods covering something unimportant, which was more interesting to me.

I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air.

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

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.

When we become a really mature, grown-up, wise society, we will put teachers at the center of the community, where they belong. We don't honor them enough, we don't pay them enough.

My parents encouraged me in everything I ever wanted to do.

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

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.

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

Kids are always asked, What are you going to be when you grow up? I needed an answer. So instead of saying, a fireman, or a policeman, I said, a reporter.

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.

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.

I don't think one should ever come to my stage of life and have to look back and say, Gosh. I wish I hadn't spent all those years doing that job I was never really interested in.

TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.

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.

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

The first books I was interested in were all about baseball. But I can't think of one single book that changed my life in any way.

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.

The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.

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.

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.

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.

Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.

What I learned on the road. Above all else - to love my native land.

To read the papers and to listen to the news... one would think the country is in terrible trouble. You do not get that impression when you travel the back roads and the small towns do care about their country and wish it well.

And still I wander, seeking compensation in unforseen encounters and unexpected sights, in sunsets, storms and passing fancies.

What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well, or the bell, or the stone walls, or the crisp October nights or the memory of dogwoods blooming. Our loyalty is not only to William Richardson Davie though we are proud of what he did 200 years ago today. Nor even to Dean Smith, though we are proud of what he did last March. No, our love for this place is based on the fact that it is as it was meant to be, the University of the people.

The reality of any place is what its people remember of it.

The greatest thing you can do in life is to tell a young boy or girl that they're 'the very best' at something - baseball, reading, art. That gives them the wonderful feeling that they can do anything, which they can!

It is liberalism, whether people like it or not, which has animated all the years of my life. What on Earth did conservatism ever accomplish for our country?

You can't travel the back roads very long without discovering a multitude of gentle people doing good for others with no expectation of gain or recognition. The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines. Some people out there spend their whole lives selflessly.

Often I have been exhausted on trout streams, uncomfortable, wet, cold, briar scarred, sunburned, mosquito bitten, but never, with a fly rod in my hand have I been less than in a place that was less than beautiful.

I would like to explore some side roads in life while I am still in good health and good spirits.

It takes an earthquake to remind us that we walk on the crust of an unfinished planet.

I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers.

It was cold out there, bitter, biting, cutting, piercing, hyperborean, marmoreal cold, and there were all these Minnesotans running around outdoors, happy as lambs in the spring.

It's that enthusiasm, that passion for what you're doing, that is most important.

There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass