Quotes from Charles Kuralt

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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

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

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

it is as it was meant to be...

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

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.

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

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