Charles Kuralt Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

You never heard anybody ask 'Elvis who?'

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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