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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Robert Krulwich Quotes

If you want to be a poet, you can just write it on a napkin, and it’s the length of the napkin, I guess. But usually you decide you’ll rhyme it, or you’ll have a formula. In radio, that’s something called, ‘Close your eyes and listen.’

– Robert Krulwich

The more borders we have, the more quarrels, the more wars. That’s one way to think about borders – they’re trouble.

– Robert Krulwich

Cezanne produced precarious little worlds that almost, almost, almost lose their balance but somehow hold themselves together, creating tension, beauty and danger all at once.

– Robert Krulwich

I did television for a very long time, but if you’re on television, words don’t count. What the eye sees beats the words. If you switch sides, from radio to television, you learn that the wordiness that you learn on the radio is useless or not nearly as powerful, and you have to learn to trust that the eye will just beat the ear.

– Robert Krulwich

Great teaching – just plain old knock ’em dead, get it right, make ’em laugh, make ’em wonder instruction – is always going to be rare. Good teachers abound. Great ones are special.

– Robert Krulwich

I am fascinated by storytelling glue. Anytime I see someone who’s good at it, I stop and wonder, ‘How’d they ‘do this? Why can’t I tear myself away?

– Robert Krulwich

When you go to the theater, you are slipping out of your life into someone else’s imaginary world.

– Robert Krulwich

If I were king of the world, babies born in airplanes, balloons and blimps would, instead of choosing to be German, Maldivian or American, all get special heavenly blue passports with a stork on the cover labeled ‘Sky Baby’ – and they’d be allowed to come and go anywhere they please.

– Robert Krulwich

When you talk or write or film, you work with the music inside you, the music that formed you. Different generations have different musics in them, so whatever they do, it’s going to come out differently, and it will speak in beats of their own generation.

– Robert Krulwich

A seed, after all, is an embryo, a potential plant waiting for its moment to grow. It has what it needs to begin. But it can also put itself on pause. It can wait.

– Robert Krulwich

So many people are not aware that NPR writes things, ‘posts’ things. But we are spreading the word.

– Robert Krulwich

News, after all, is a spin of words and pictures. It’s a kind of music. There are beats in a newscast, a newspaper story. Ed Murrow sounded like Ed Murrow. Huntley and Brinkley sounded different. Anderson Cooper, different still.

– Robert Krulwich

What happens if you are the last (the very, very last) of your species, and you die – and humans notice? We live, increasingly, at a time when extinctions are recorded, remembered, and the last animal (or plant) in its line, by virtue of its being last, becomes a kind of celebrity. Its finality becomes a thing to honor.

– Robert Krulwich

When I was a teenager, I loved political conventions.

– Robert Krulwich

Journalism doesn’t have to be your first love… or your only love. You can come to it in desperation, because you can’t think of anything better to do with your life, that it’s this or the abyss. But once you get going… it helps if you love it.

– Robert Krulwich