CHARLES KURALT

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'm not any kind of social reformer.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

It's best to leap into something you know you love. You might change your mind later, but that is the privilege of youth.

We always take credit for the good and attribute the bad to fortune.

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.

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

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.

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