David Geffen Quotes

I’m a great believer in anything that makes you 1 percent better. So I try everything. Freudian. Jungian. Est. Life Spring. Course in Miracles. Twelve Steps. I have pain from time to time. I have joy from time to time.

I probably didn’t handle things as diplomatically as I should.

Steve Jobs didn’t give a shit about money, and I do give a shit about money. I wanted to have a lot of money. I thought it would change my life, which it did, but not in the ways I expected.

People who are fools don’t get successful, and they don’t get to be successful if they are worried about their popularity.

The bullsh*t is more interesting than the truth.

I never felt I was too protective. I felt I was functioning as a dam against the river of sh*t that comes pouring down on artists, and it was a job that I took very seriously.

[On Roberts saying ‘I don’t know if I want to give up my whole management company and take it apart.’] Don’t be stupid. I’ll make you more money than you’ve made alone.

[On Calvin Klein asking him ‘Why don’t you call it Geffen Records?’] People in the record business just don’t do that. They come up with names likes Asylum, Capricorn, or Island. [Calvin Klein said if you put your own name on the door ‘You’ll get laid more.’]

[On urging Nyro to tell Barbara Streisand that ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ had been personally written for her] It’s not a big lie.

I believe we’re all in denial about the people we love.

There were no role models, there were no other people I knew who were dealing with the same issues that I was dealing with. I had no idea if this was a stage I was going through or not. But I go to the draft board in Brooklyn and I fill out the form and there was a question that said ‘Do you have homosexual tendencies?’ and I check yes. But where-ever I was on line I’d see people I went to high school with and I was afraid of anyone knowing this about me so I kept on falling back into line and falling back into line. If you said you had homosexual tendencies they sent you to a psychiatrist. He said ‘I see here you’ve checked the box?’ And I said ‘yup’. He said ‘So do you think you’d have a problem serving in the armed forces?’ I said well you know ‘So many men.’ And I was out of the service.

[As a child] I want to earn a thousand dollars a week, have an apartment on Ocean Parkway, and drive a Cadillac convertible.

If you really believe it – go for it.

When we first started DreamWorks, I said to Jeffrey, ‘We ought to call this new company the Spielberg Brothers. Anything Steven thinks is important, we want to invest in.

From the day I arrived, California seemed like an enchanted land.

[In 1990 on the president of MCA calling and saying ‘We’re going to make you the biggest offer this company has ever made, and I’m going to send it to you by messenger right now.’] It’s 1990. Send me a fax.

In Los Angeles, they don’t want you to fail, they want you to die.

I’ve always thought that each person invented himself… for whatever reason, through whatever circumstance, through whatever he is gone through… that we are each a figment of our own imagination… And some people have a greater ability to imagine than others.

Are you threatening me? If you so much as touch me I’ll have you arrested!

[On his first job in the mailroom of William Morris a casting agency] It was the first time in the my life that I thought ‘I can do that.’

Of course it scored well! It was all fags and old people!