A Quote by Jacob Weisberg
For the grifter, ripping people off is seldom the point. The grifter is an artiste who invests in the long con.
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Donald Trump is an archetypal grifter. Using the presidency to promote your golf courses, hotels, and real estate business is grifting. So is getting people to pay a premium for buildings with your name in big, gold letters. Licensing your name is what every grifter dreams about.
There really are two Americas, one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money.
No sense in being a grifter if it's the same as being a citizen.
A grifter's got an irresistible urge to be the guy who's wise. There's nothin' to whipping a fool. Hell, fools are made to be whipped. But to take another pro. Even your partner, who knows you and has his eye on you. That's a score! No matter what happens.
Where the grifter is shameless, the grafter shrinks from exposure, which could only endanger the racket. He is greedy but not creatively ambitious. He toils in mundane self-dealing, insider trading, bribe taking, witness tampering, and other forms of workaday corruption.
Very seldom in my fiction have I directly used the stories people have told me. I think ripping off people's lives in fiction is dangerous. It also lacks imagination.
But I think it shortsells any idea when you say there's a similar part to something else, like 'aw man, 'The Avengers' is ripping off 'Batman.' You've got people running around in outfits.' Of course, there are outfitted people and there's superhero stuff, but it's not just ripping off 'Batman.'
Nearly everyone who chooses to work for Donald Trump is disreputable in one way or another; Ali Baba didn't find 40 wise men in the cave. But to label everyone in Trumpworld a grifter misses important subtleties. It conflates grifters and grafters, and it ignores the crucial distinction between the two.
The way that I'm working now is basically the way I've been working since I was a kid: Find the greatest artist in whatever you do, and rip them off with respect. I think there's a big difference between ripping off with respect and ripping off in disrespect.
I usually find stuff that I hope no one really knows or cares about. If I'm ripping off something that's already brilliant, what's the point?
I think the Con-Con issue is really diversionary. I've always been against Con-Con, from the very first the time the idea was raised. Everybody knows that.
The fact is I look at what's happening to this country, I look at the way China is just ripping us off, I look at OPEC the way they are ripping us off with the oil prices. I mean, people are gonna be paying six and seven dollars a gallon for gasoline very, very soon; and you're gonna be up to $150 a barrel; and they wouldn't even be there if it weren't for us.
'Gilmore Girls' was a passion of mine, to the point where Lennon actually can't watch it because if she does, then we might be fully ripping them off.
I think we are making progress, but we have long way to go. People also have got to understand the agenda that we are fighting for. This is a senator who has taken on every powerful special interest, whether it's Wall Street, whether it's drug companies who are ripping off the American people, the military industrial complex.
I believe we are a species with amnesia, I think we have forgotten our roots and our origins. I think we are quite lost in many ways. And we live in a society that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy in ensuring that we all stay lost. A society that invests in creating unconsciousness, which invests in keeping people asleep so that we are just passive consumers or products and not really asking any of the questions.
Sometimes people ask, 'Does writing make you happy?' But I think that's beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you're off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled.
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