Steve Rushin Quotes

I was really just the tea boy to begin with, or the equivalent thereof, but I quickly announced, innocently but very ambitiously, that I wanted to be, I was going to be, a foreign correspondent.

I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.

The opportunity to write for the 'L.A. Weekly' has been one of the better breaks that has come my way in a long time.

I got a journalism degree. I started doing journalism - I interned at 'Cosmopolitan' magazine in the 1970s, which probably wasn't the best place for me, and I spent six or nine months freelancing. Anyway, I wasn't that good at it.

I started, actually, in journalism when I was - well. I started at the 'New York Times' when I was 18 years old, actually, but really got into journalism when I was 15 years old and had started a sports magazine which was trying to become a national sports magazine.

I became a copy boy. Not for long. I started writing stories.

By the time I started high school, I knew I wanted to be a writer. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, I moved to New York City and worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.

I started working for the 'NY Observer' when I was 33. After I had been writing for them for about a year and a half the editor said, 'Your stories are the most talked about stories in the 'Observer'; you should have your own column.'

I was an English major in college. I was an obnoxious, tortured poet who wasn't very good. And after I graduated, I was a newspaper reporter in my hometown for three and a half years. And then I went and got my MFA at University of Alabama. And while I was at Alabama, that's when I began publishing, first literary magazines, and then at Harper's.

I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn - be it chiming in with constructive criticism or giving me sound advice about my career plan.

I am grateful to have spent 25 years at the 'International Herald Tribune' - a newspaper where I had unstinting support in being able to express myself freely and honestly.

'The Atlantic' really gave me my writing career - even just the conviction to be a writer.

I got an offer at 'Vogue.' And I desperately wanted to work in magazines. My interest wasn't in fashion, but when you get an offer right out of college for a magazine that big - I decided that it was probably better to start at a big name magazine, even if I wasn't necessarily fascinated with the subject.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

My life is not very different from what it was 20 years ago. In fact, my career hasn't changed much since I was 22.

My first ever job of doing additional writing for Hans was 'Batman Begins', so that's going back I don't know, are we at 13 years now? I was his assistant for maybe ten years, a long journey.

I started my career with 'Teen Diva,' and that helped me learn anchoring. Fortunately, I got work after the show ended.

When I started at the Wall Street Journal after college in 1990, there were lots of smart women around me all the time. They were writing for the paper, serving as managing editor, winning Pulitzers and anchoring the weekend show I worked on. It was so inspiring to me.

Sometimes, guys are in a slump, or you feel like you're not doing anything with the company, and I felt like that for years. But it can all change.

I didn't write professionally at first. It took me nine years to get anything published. At the beginning I mostly wrote picture books, which were rejected by every children's book publisher in America. The first book of mine to be accepted for publication was ELLA ENCHANTED, and not one but two publishers wanted it. That day, April 17, 1996, was one of the happiest in my life.

Today in coaching, it's a two-way street. They can fire you whenever they want. Bottom line: It's all about what you can do to better yourself professionally. This is a better move.

You can't just think that you will get a job for no good reason... And I think that the other part is you have to work your way up, you know I did a lot of Xeroxing and getting coffee...I always did what I was asked to do. I delivered. People knew that I would get things done and get them done well. And that is a big part of our resumes, are based on being responsible and being willing to do what needed to be done.

I believe over the last six years now, I've been learning in between actual acting moments on the show.

Nine years of experience is very different from one year of experience, nine times.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.