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

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.
Charles Kuralt

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

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

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.
Charles Kuralt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
Charles Kuralt

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

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