David Geffen

I came in early every day for six months till I intercepted the letter from UCLA saying they’d never heard of me. I replaced it with a letter that said I’d graduated.

You have an idea of the way you think it is, and it’s not that way at all, it’s something else.

We were all young and we were all inventing our careers. I was very close to Jackson, just as I’d been very close to Laura Nyro. With each person I had a unique relationship.

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

I thought Laura’s record was going to be huge… It was not successful it sold something like 20 or 30,000 albums. Laura lacked a certain level of ambition and didn’t really want to do the things that people do to become known. So I thought I’d better get people to record these songs and make them hits so that people will see that she’s a great songwriter.

You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about! You’re crazy!

No person in their right mind would want to put their family through what I’ve had to put my family through.

I have to be in tune with my husband, where he is, how he’s feeling. I have to be in tune with where my family is. The same thing is true in the work that I do. It’s all about me feeling where people are. So that’s why I try to be really present, even when I’m on a rope line. I never take for granted my interactions with people. And it’s never black-and-white. I’m usually reading the crowd, reading the people that I’m with. I guess if this role has changed me, it’s improved my ability to do that. I’ve gotten better at sensing where people are at any given time.

Dont ever get it twisted, me, Kourtney and Khloe are GOOD! ALWAYS!!!! Never question that!

My mother’s a psychologist, my stepfather’s a psychologist, my stepmother is a therapist and my dad’s a lawyer. So it was all prominent in my life. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know someone on some form of prescription medicine.

I guess my parents were strict. There were a few times when being with my friends and had bring my sister. It was just my parents best interests.

I was bribing North to wear her butter 350’s by saying they glow in the dark. However, she made me turn off the lights to test it. She caught me lying but Kanye was on speaker phone and said don’t worry I will make them.

There was a lot of charm in just living in a big family compound of a house. My two uncles, who were into jazz, lived in the basement, and one of them, Uncle Peter, taught me my first songs on the ukulele.

As children we recognized that we belonged to an unusual, even exceptional, family, but the effect was different on each of us.

Nobody loves me but my mother – And she could be jivin’, too.

My father was a perfectionist. We had to hop to everything and have marvelous table manners. I could only wear navy blue and gray and white. He wanted me to be interested in tennis and horses just like a little princess, but I couldn’t stand such things.

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.

My grandma is probably the only person on this planet that I still remember their home number by heart

My father would always praise me. He always thought I was the smartest person

I tell my children now that they are older, ‘If something happens to me… don’t make no big fuss over me. Don’t make no big expense on my funeral. Don’t put any pressure on the rest of the family. I’ve loved everybody, and I hope they loved me. But don’t create this big expense for the family.’

You leave home to seek your fortune and when you get it, you go home and share it with your family.