David Geffen

[On his early day in the music business] I stepped on a lot of toes… at that time.

I didn’t really have any idea of what Hollywood was except that it was a place where the made movies.

That had her lip-syncing to a record… There was no protection for her as a person or as an artist…

I never went to business school. I was just bumbling through a lot of my life. I was like the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz.

[To Robertson] I think you should move to California. Malibu is paradise. You can always change your mind. Why don’t you just let me put this together? I’ll get you a house in the Malibu Colony.

[To a psychedelic rock sextet call Strawberry Alarm Clock] We’re going to get you six Ed Sullivan shows and we’re going to get you on Janis Joplin’s next tour. [After the meeting on being told by Schiffman ‘David, what are you doing? Six Ed Sullivan shows? Are you kidding? Janis Joplin wouldn’t piss on these people! We are not going to give them any Janis Joplin dates’] If they have another hit, we’ll get them one Ed Sullivan show, and we’ll get them a couple of dates on somebody else’s tour. I don’t care. And if they don’t have another hit, well, f*ck ’em.

For four to six months at a time, I would barely eat. I lived on a diet of Melba toast, carrots, and black coffee.

The patient is not likely to recover who makes the doctor his heir.

It’s not about eating healthy to lose weight. It’s about eating healthy to feel good.

I have a form of Parkinson’s disease, which I don’t like. My legs don’t move when my brain tells them to. It’s very frustrating.

The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.

You have good days and bad days, and depression’s something that, y’know, is always with you.

I feel like there’s this glamour… where the woman who has a psychological illness is in fur, laid out on a chaise. Whereas in reality, a woman with mental illness or… is struggling with her psychological wellbeing is often in sweats and in a T-shirt that used to belong to her dad and is covered in food bits.

In the medical community, you would never deny a diabetic his insulin ever. But for some reasons, when someone needs a serotonin inhibitor, they’re immediately crazy or something. And I don’t know, it’s a very interesting double standard that I often don’t have the ability to talk about but I certainly feel no shame about.

My brain and my heart are really important to me, I don’t know why I wouldn’t seek help to have those things be as healthy as my teeth. I go to the dentist. So why wouldn’t I go to a shrink?

There’s not shame in dealing with these things. There’s no shame in having to fight everyday.

HIV infection and AIDS is growing – but so too is public apathy. We have already lost too many friends and colleagues.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

A lot of people undermine their own anxiety because they’re like…nothing’s necessarily going wrong. It just happens and it’s just inside of you and that’s not something you should be ashamed of. It’s justified because it’s happening.

You don’t see the mental illness: It’s not a mass; it’s not a cyst. But it’s there. Why do you need to prove it?

Women in particular need to keep an eye on their physical and mental health, because if we’re scurrying to and from appointments and errands, we don’t have a lot of time to take care of ourselves. We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‘to do’ list.