Whit Stillman Quotes

I started writing and photographing for different publications and finally ended up being the correspondent in South Asia, for the Geneva-based Journal de Geneve, which at one time used to be one of the best international newspapers in Europe.

The idea of being a foreign correspondent and wandering the world and witnessing great events, having adventures and covering the activities of world leaders, appealed to me greatly. It was a very glamorous life in those days.

You have to be desirable. And that's why so many woman of my age or even younger are pushed to Botox and plastic surgery, all the things that people say, 'Why do women do this?' Where do you go in your 50s in your career?

I've had a very interesting career. I get to do amazing things and work with amazing people and travel and learn languages - things most people don't get the opportunity to do.

I've seen what can happen to an actor when he's just working for the sake of working. All of a sudden it's ten years later, your career's happened, and you haven't had any control.

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.

In England, the profession of the law is that which seems to hold out the strongest attraction to talent, from the circumstance, that in it ability, coupled with exertion, even though unaided by patronage, cannot fail of obtaining reward.

I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the 'New York Times,' when it had an edition in Paris, in 1963. I sold the paper in the streets by day and tore wire copy off the tele-printer for the editors making up the edition by night.

A passive approach to professional growth will leave you by the wayside.

Journalism took me around the world. I worked in London for ten years and reported on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the first Gulf War.

Girls like Diana Spencer, armed with nothing more than a guinea-pig-rearing certificate, proud to say in that old Sloane way that she was 'as thick as two short planks,' became the exception as girls from Benenden and Downe House started to fast-track towards the City and law, consultancy, media and the arts.

My ego thinks I would like to be considered for more heavyweight roles, but the price you pay for that is they are always the same kind of roles.

Strangely enough, politics may just be the one realm in which having kids imposes no penalty on women. Kids are practically a necessity. For scientists, or Supreme Court justices, or chief executives, or the woman who wants to learn to fly F-l8s off an aircraft carrier, it works differently.

I'm contemplating moving to London for a period of time. I've been in Los Angeles for 15 years and I'm really tired of it. I'm continually uninspired by what's being sent to me. Even by huge films that they're doing there. They're just awful.

I was miserable in WCW. I knew I wasn't going to go any higher there, and jumping to WWE hadn't even crossed my mind. I couldn't stop wondering, 'Is this it? Is this what I worked my whole life for?'

If you had your life to live over again, do it overseas.

I have gotten to travel the world and experience all these incredible things thanks to my career.

A postsecondary education is the ticket to economic success in America.

When I was leaving NBC News to go to CNN, people would say, 'What?! Why would you possibly leave the 'Today Show' to go to cable?' If I would've listened to people, I would've been on a great platform, but I wouldn't have grown as a journalist. So far, most of the steps in my career have been really good.

The desire to become a journalist came really because I very much like living abroad, and like to travel, and wanted to be paid for it.

This may sound funny, but as much as the 'Today' show matured me, it also was something of a cocoon. I'd been happy there. I never went into the boss's office and pounded my fist on the desk, saying, 'Give me more money! Give me a prime-time show!'

The longer you're stuck in a position that doesn't truly challenge you, the less likely you'll be able to leave it. Inertia, in fact, is one of my worst fears.

The U.S. Census Bureau acknowledged this fact when it reported that those with a bachelor's degree earn on average $1 million more over their lifetime than those with only a high school diploma.

Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.

I went to Brown to be a French professor, and I didn't know what I was doing except that I loved French. When I got to Paris and I could speak French, I know how much it helped me to establish relationships with Karl Lagerfeld, with the late Yves St. Laurent. French, it just helps you if you're in fashion. The French people started style.