Quotes from Charles Kuralt

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm not any kind of social reformer.

What I learned on the road. Above all else - to love my native land.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.

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 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 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.