David Geffen

You can’t interview my brother!… We can call this thing off – right now!

I’m not Sammy Glick. I’ve never killed anyone. I don’t have to. I’m too talented.

I think everybody thought I was crazy that I quit my job and started a management company in which I was managing one client – Laura Nyro.

I was sleeping on a couch in my brothers apartment, and one day this guy walked over and said ‘How would you like to be in a movie?’ And I said ‘Yeah!’ I was an extra in ‘Explosive Generation’.

I thought I’d be a success even back in the mailroom at William Morris. It was just inconceivable to me I couldn’t win it all.

This is between us! You know this is the best thing for the company.

We have a very open culture at the company, where we foster a lot of interaction between not just me and people but between everyone else. It’s an open floor plan. People have these desks where no one really has an office. I mean, I have a room where I meet with people. But it has all glass, so everyone can see into it and see what’s going on.

I have a great, great company. I employ thousands of people. And I’m very proud of the job I did.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.

It was impossible to operate in the aluminium business without krysha – very real physical protection.

Businesses that grow by development and improvement do not die.

I must have had a dozen jobs and I got fired from all of them.

When most people ask about a business growing, what they really mean is growing revenue, not just growing the number of people using a service. Traditional businesses would view people using your service that you don’t make money from as a cost.

Acquiring the habit of note-taking is therefore a wonderfully complementary skill to that of listening.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

I did not feel ‘evil’ when I wrote advertisements for Puerto Rico. They helped attract industry and tourists to a country which had been living on the edge of starvation for 400 years.

It is only by being bold that you get anywhere. If you are a risk-taker, then the art is to protect the downside.

The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

[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.’]

Mass production is craftsmanship with the drudgery taken out of it.

While I love technology and social media, a text or a tweet can never replace the real value of conversation.