Quotes By Charles Kuralt

Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.

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'm not any kind of social reformer.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.