David Geffen

[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.

The opportunity for an entrepreneur to start a company from scratch today is abysmal.

Is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton?

It’s easy in music to tell what’s good. It’s hard to tell what’s bad.

[On Laura Nyro] Anything she wanted, I wanted to get for her.

My father died in 1960. He was an intellectual. . . . She made the money and he read a lot. He wasn’t successful or ambitious. He spoke lots of languages. There were times that kids said to me, ‘What does your father do?’ and I had to make something up because I actually didn’t know what he did.

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

Whenever you see a successful person you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them.

You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then Success is sure.

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.

A successful person finds the right place for himself. But a successful leader finds the right place for others.

You always pass failure on the way to success.

Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.

Everyone who achieves success in a great venture, solves each problem as they came to it. They helped themselves. And they were helped through powers known and unknown to them at the time they set out on their voyage. They keep going regardless of the obstacles they met.

If I had to select one quality and one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick persistence I and determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying, “Here comes number seventy one”.

To be successful you must accept all challenges that come your way. You can’t just accept the ones you like.

I don’t think people get to be successful without ambition.

There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed.

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

It’s next to impossible to build a successful business without relationships.