Robert Gottlieb > Quotes

“I have fixed more sentences than most people have read in their lives.”
― Robert Gottlieb

“But I had learned a lesson about the overwhelming need of narcissists to be in the right, and to punish those by whom they feel slighted.”
― Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader: A Life

“Ho un amico che non ama Dickens. Non so se compatirlo o picchiarlo.”
― Robert Gottlieb

“One suspects that the haste with which some performers and some writers brush aside the traditional-jazz renaissance reflects their understanding of the devastating effect that an insistence on the traditional values would have upon the world of modern jazz to which they belong”
― Robert Gottlieb, Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now

“And even as the chariot of time hustles me along, I never forget that Bob Caro is coming up from behind with volume five of LBJ. I hope he makes it. I hope I make it.”
― Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader: A Life

“Anyone can be adorable. Not many can be industrious. With results.”
― Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader: A Life

“Nothing is real for me until I've read about it.”
― Robert Gottlieb, Avid Reader: A Life

“..in contemporary modern music, the working out is so intellectual that the extempore act does not give the modernist time to concoct anything he himself would consider significant”
― Robert Gottlieb, Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now

“love-making and good food are the essential ingredients of life”
― Robert Gottlieb, Garbo: Her Life, Her Films

“So how can you say Jazz started in whorehouses when the musicianers didn't have no real need for them?”
― Robert Gottlieb, Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now

“Except physically, we know little more about Garbo than we know about Shakespeare.”
― Robert Gottlieb, Garbo: Her Life, Her Films

“I've simply always lacked even the slightest religious impulse- when people talk about their faith, I can't connect with what they're talking about. This isn't a decision I came to, or a deep belief or principle; I'm just religion-deaf, the way tone-deaf people hear sounds and not music. I suppose my religion is reading.”
― Robert Gottlieb

“You see, Miss Garbo, American men don’t like fat women.”
― Robert Gottlieb, Garbo: Her Life, Her Films