Charles Kuralt Quotes

It's that enthusiasm, that passion for what you're doing, that is most important.

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

Pomeranians speak only to Poodles and Poodles speak only to God.

I didn't know what narcissism was until I beheld my own naricssus.

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

You can't travel the back roads very long without discovering a multitude of gentle people doing good for others with no expectation of gain or recognition. The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines. Some people out there spend their whole lives selflessly.

I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers.

America is a great story and there is a river on every page of it.

I didn't have the ambition to be a broadcaster. I was going to be a newspaper reporter the rest of my life, but that opportunity came along.

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

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.

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

To read the papers and to listen to the news ... one would think the country is in terrible trouble. You do not get that impression when you travel the back roads and the small towns do care about their country and wish it well.

There is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grass

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.

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 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.

Often I have been exhausted on trout streams, uncomfortable, wet, cold, briar scarred, sunburned, mosquito bitten, but never, with a fly rod in my hand have I been less than in a place that was less than beautiful.

If there are bleachers in heaven and a warm sun, that's where you'll find Bill Veeck.

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.

A true Southerner will never say in 2-3 words what can better be said in 10-12.

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.

New York is the true City of Light in any season.

The reality of any place is what its people remember of it.

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'm not knocking the wholesale grocery business or any other, but there is a kind of romance in journalism which some people, the lucky ones, feel inside them all their lives.

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 think the feature reporter often walks a very thin line between a truly human story and one that slops over into mushiness or sentimentality.

The storytelling tradition that you bring from the South, I don't know where it arose, but it's still there. You can't go to the feed store, or the country courthouse without running into storytellers.

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

I don't know what makes a good feature story. I've always assumed that if it was a story that interested or amused me, that it would have the same impact on other people.

I made friends with a lot of those who could have criticized me in print and who didn't, who praised me instead.

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

What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well, or the bell, or the stone walls, or the crisp October nights or the memory of dogwoods blooming. Our loyalty is not only to William Richardson Davie though we are proud of what he did 200 years ago today. Nor even to Dean Smith, though we are proud of what he did last March. No, our love for this place is based on the fact that it is as it was meant to be, the University of the people.

For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself. So they were always about somebody I like, 'cause if I didn't like him, I just didn't do the story. And to have somebody else paying the bills for this tourism, to every corner of every stage, over and over again? Why, who wouldn't want a job like that?

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

What you need for breakfast, they say in East Tennessee, is a jug of good corn liquor, a thick steak and a hound dog. Then you feed the steak to the dog.

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

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.

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.

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

Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.

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 would like to explore some side roads in life while I am still in good health and good spirits.

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.

And still I wander, seeking compensation in unforseen encounters and unexpected sights, in sunsets, storms and passing fancies.

I'm not any kind of social reformer.

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.

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.

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 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 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.