Quotes By Charles Kuralt

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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