Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Kuralt - Page 2

...Pomeranians speak only to Poodles and Poodles speak only to God.

Most of those old settlers told it like it was, rough and rocky. They named their towns Rimrock, Rough Rock, Round Rock, and Wide Ruins, Skull Valley, Bitter Springs, Wolf Hole, Tombstone. It's a tough country. The names of Arizona towns tell you all you need to know.

What you need for breakfast, they say in East Tennessee, is a jug of good corn liquor, a thick steak and a hound dog. Then you feed the steak to the dog.

A true Southerner will never say in 2-3 words what can better be said in 10-12.

You can find your way across this country using burger joint the way a navigatior uses stars....We have munched Bridge burgers in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and Cable burgers hard by the Golden Gate, Dixie burgers in the sunny South and Yankee Doodle burgers in the North....We had a Capitol Burger - guess where. And so help us, in the inner courtyard of the Pentagon, a Penta burger.

I didn't know what narcissism was until I beheld my own naricssus.

If there are bleachers in heaven and a warm sun, that's where you'll find Bill Veeck.

I made friends with a lot of those who could have criticized me in print and who didn't, who praised me instead.

I had a tight stomach all the time. I actually developed ulcers. I've learned better than to put all that internal pressure on myself.

I did stories about unexpected encounters, back roads, small towns and ordinary folk, sometimes doing something a little extraordinary.

The storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don't know where it arose, but it's still there. You can't go to the feed store, or the country courthouse without running into storytellers.

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

I think the feature reporter often walks a very thin line between a truly human story and one that slops over into mushiness or sentimentality.

I much preferred the peaceful life on the road, where I didn't have to ask embarrassing questions and do all the things real reporters have to do.

I gained a great appreciation for what I would call the collective achievement of the country. I began thinking of America as a much more just and humane place than I would have thought if I'd been covering the civil rights struggle.

Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people. They nourish and refresh us and provide a home for dazzling varieties of fish and wildlife and trees and plants of every sort. We are a nation rich in rivers.

For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself. So they were always about somebody I like, 'cause if I didn't like him, I just didn't do the story. And to have somebody else paying the bills for this tourism, to every corner of every stage, over and over again? Why, who wouldn't want a job like that?

Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people.... We are a nation rich in rivers.

America is a great story and there is a river on every page of it.

You know, most reporters can't go back to the towns they wrote stories about. I never wrote that kind of story.

I didn't have the ambition to be a broadcaster. I was going to be a newspaper reporter the rest of my life, but that opportunity came along.

New York is the true City of Light in any season.

The sparrows are preparing for winter, each one dressed in a plain brown coat and singing a cheerful song.

I'm not knocking the wholesale grocery business or any other, but there is a kind of romance in journalism which some people, the lucky ones, feel inside them all their lives.

I was on the high school track team, believe it or not, and played baseball, poorly but passionately.

You never heard anybody ask 'Elvis who?'

I don't know what makes a good feature story. I've always assumed that if it was a story that interested or amused me, that it would have the same impact on other people.

I have spent a good part of my life looking for the perfect barbecue. There is no point in looking in places like Texas, where they put some kind of ketchup on beef and call it barbecue. Barbecue is pork, which narrows the search to the South, and if it's really good pork barbecue you are looking for, to North Carolina.

That was the overwhelming thing to me, the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it.