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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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

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

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

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote

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.
- Charles Kuralt Quote