Quotes By Charles Kuralt

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.