Nat Hentoff Quotes

I got the first job and kept going. Once I got a job, I very much wanted to keep getting jobs, basically. I did try to learn what I could in those first couple of decades.

I've come to realize your career is all about the choices you make. Every single one matters.

Even though I have been receiving offers left, right and centre, I have been a little choosy about my projects.

I've been a paperboy, a short-order cook, a warehouse clerk, and, eventually, a partner at IBM.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

I've just been lucky. I'd like to have more choices, and I'd like to have a leading part.

My father's peripatetic career also gave me critical perspective when it came to my own career choices.

Nobody asked you to flip burgers for the rest of your life.

My first job was to run a concessions cart. Later, I found a position at the Pacific Film Archive. Thus began a long series of jobs, each one slightly better than the last, that continued for a decade, until I sold my first novel, and still goes on, even now.

I kind of have never thought about a career path, which is an unusual approach.

It took a long time to get to the place in my career where I could pick and choose what I wanted to do.

I think it's been confusing for people because I haven't had a linear career.

My brother Robert wanted to act from a very early age, and there was always a part of me that said we couldn't have two actors in the family because our parents would go mental. So I became a runner for the Robert Stigwood Organisation and, one way or another, worked my way up to movie publicist.

It would have shown people that I was prepared to do that kind of work, although I find myself in a position now where I don't really need to and I could pick and choose the kind of characters I'd like to do.

I've worked at a deli, I've worked construction, I've worked a few different jobs.

I think my mum wanted me to join the army or something, or become a surveyor - something with good career prospects.

Denzel Washington, Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise: those guys have well-planned careers. I'm just on a journey. Wherever I run across a job, I say, 'Okay, I'll do that.'

When I look back on my career - if that's what it is - it looks a bit like a crazy quilt, and I think it's just really because, when one job has finished, I've never really been in a position where I had three or four options.

I left school at 16 and skipped university to work, initially as a waiter. I think I missed out on what would have been great years.

I learned to take the first job that you have in the business that you want to get into. It doesn't matter what that job is, you get your foot in the door.

I started graduate school in 1971, I started working at the Smithsonian in the festival in 1972. I went full-time at the Smithsonian in 1974. And I got my doctorate in 1975.

I worked in 40 restaurants over a five-year period.

There's never been any game plan or thread through my career. It's just happened that I've ricocheted from one interesting character to another.

I've never been a career builder. I didn't go to drama school and hardly went to any school at all.

I don't know how I could plan my career.