Robert Greene

“I've always handwritten my first drafts. Now I can only handwrite because I can't type. I used to be a very fast typist. Now I can't because of my stroke.”

“Ego, politics, playing, you know, making other people look good. That is 90% of the game, especially when you're starting out.”

“If I had to put a percentage on it, and I've thought about this, and it's not scientific by no means, I think about five percent of people actually understand these laws intuitively”

“Prior to writing the 48 laws of power, I was not a successful person, I have to admit. I had 50, at least 50, 60 different jobs.”

“If you're alienating everybody, if you're crushing all of these people, if you're just having lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit, there, there'll be a bounce back effect where you won't have many allies next time you're in trouble, right? People will resent y…”

“We want to be led. We actually want to be deceived. We want illusion. We want fantasy. We want pleasure, and so you want to be the person that's supplying that fantasy, that's giving people that pleasure, because if you do, it gives you a lot of power, right?”

“In 1020 years people are going to react against that and they're going to be more into fantasy and role playing and wearing those masks and having fun in the social environment.”

“Nobody is ever authentic. It's a myth. It's bullshit, in fact, and it kind of is annoying because to be a human being is to be social and is to wear a mask, is to be an actor.”

“When you have leverage in a situation, in any situation in life, you have to use your leverage, and what a lot of people do, they're afraid of the leverage that they have. They're afraid they're going to offend the other person. They're afraid they're going to…”

“So a seductive person is self-aware. They're self-aware of their body language, Of, you know, the clothes that they wear, of how they talk. The anti-seductive person has no self-awareness.”

“And I say, if you do too much of that, I'm not going to use her name, People will become so familiar with you that you're gonna lose that aura of being a celebrity. They're gonna take you for granted, and you might shine for a year with being out there and hav…”

“If you dress a certain way that seems a little bit out of character, not completely out of character, you go, wow, you need to do that in a relationship constantly, otherwise it's just gonna fizzle, all the energy's gonna go out of it.”

“A lot of the books out there that talk about power in this world, I feel like really unrealistic. They're very wary of the truth. And the truth is, as I discovered in all my different jobs, is that people are, can be very manipulative. They don't show it. It's…”

“In any project, you need to keep things a little bit, you have to keep things open-ended, so that you're just constantly discovering, and that keeps you excited and energized and creative, so I never kind of close the book.”

“You can't write a book about human nature if it's all white men”

“Coco Chanel ended up being kind of a Nazi sympathizer. It's the main black mark on her story, a very large black mark.”

“Writing things out by hand has a logic to it. So when I'm going through a book, and I'm taking notes, and I'm scrawling with my fountain pen on a card, I'm actually thinking more deeply than when I'm sitting there typing stuff on the computer. I don't know how…”

“And I know Ryan was a friend of yours who I taught this system to essentially He does the same thing. He writes them out.”

“And so it's a growing process, as I said, you keep it open, because if you go into a book, oh, I know exactly what it's going to be, and how many chapters, and what, it dies on the vine.”

“He's a great writer, but I try not to read his books because I don't want to be covering or overlapping or being inspired by what's already out there. I want to hit something new. I want to be original. I want to say something that comes from my brain.”

“Some of it, quite honestly, is really bad. I just say it outright. You know, I read books About envy, or I have them on my shelf. I have dozens of them, and they're so thin, and they're so unthought through and they're so irritating that I much prefer the way …”

“And then, you know, I just do three hours every day of the writing because it's about all I can stomach.”

“The way the human brain works is your best ideas come to you when you're not thinking about them. You know if you're sitting there always doing other things and chatting with people and texting them, The brain won't have the mental space to unconsciously proce…”

“People love to talk about themselves. I mean, that's, Law number one of human psychology. People, the favorite subject for anybody, myself included, is myself.”

“They're talking so much, but that's always a sign of insecurity. A kind of a quietness, a seriousness people who kind of admit that they're not always right generally are signs of the non-bullshitter.”

“Law number one of the book is never outshine the master, and I probably violated that law maybe three or four times prior to writing the book where I'd be the researcher on a television show and I was so good at it that everybody hated me. I was like, you know…”

“The meditation has helped me an awful lot in controlling my emotional responses. 90% of the meditating, I do a practice, a form of Zen meditation, and what you're doing is, it's hard to concept to relate, but the idea is, You're thinking of your thinking as if…”

“The less you say, the more other people talk. The more other people talk, the more you learn about their weaknesses, and you learn about their Hidden desires, and what makes them tick, and the less they know about you, and the less they know about you, the bet…”

“Law 48 is assume formlessness, and that means all 47 laws are, can be kind of nonsense, and you should just ignore them, and you should just be in the moment and not go into situations thinking of, oh, I better do law 41 You be, you must be alive to the circum…”

“When you're working for someone else and you're flipping burgers at Burger King, it's dead time. They own you. And, but if you're working at Burger King, And you've just read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, and you're thinking about it, or you're working at …”

“I would not be a writer if it wasn't for Robert Greene. I would not be, Able to think the way that I think if it wasn't for Robert Greene, I'd be a much worse person if I never met Robert Greene”

“I would say probably 80% of his work is in the research, and 20% is in the writing.”