A Quote by Robert Gottlieb

In today's world, it never looks good when you're suing somebody who earned $20,000 for writing a book over a period of a year or two. — © Robert Gottlieb
In today's world, it never looks good when you're suing somebody who earned $20,000 for writing a book over a period of a year or two.
Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.
If you have a horse that can beat horses worth $20,000, typically you enter it in a $20,000 claiming race. Now there might be people who feel their horse is worth $20,000, and they say, 'I wouldn't mind seeing the horse get beat.' So they'll enter it for $40,000 so the horse looks like it's performed badly.
Still, records are documents of a period of time. Most records are documents of two or three years, and I just approached it as a record I was doing over a 20-year period of time.
Somebody once told me - and I could be wrong about this - that The West Wing was, on any given episode, $300,000 over, on average. Now today, if you were $10,000 over budget, they would cancel you. For sure.
Monty Python paid me £20,000 to write, direct and assemble them - the cheapskates! I told them I'd never earned less in a year since leaving Cambridge. The first show sold out in 43 seconds and we ended up performing ten in total. We had no idea there would be such demand.
You have never lost money in stocks over any 20-year period, but you have wiped out half your portfolio in bonds (after inflation). So which is the riskier asset?
In New Orleans, where I'm from, the average household income, with two working parents, two kids, a dog and a little fence is $16,000 a year, so $15,000 for a movie sounds pretty good.
My father, a bookkeeper who never earned more than $11,000 a year in his life, sat there, writing out a $25 check to the NAACP. When I asked him why, he said discrimination against anyone is discrimination against us all. And I never forgot that. Indeed, his philanthropy was a gift, not just to that organization, but to me.
We, Homo sapiens, destroyed the majority of the large mammalian species in North America and Australasia just over 10,000 years ago. We, Homo sapiens, now are destroying the other species that presently exist on this planet at a rate of about 15,000 to 20,000 per year.
The earth's history over the past several million years is that for every 100,000 years, we go through a dramatic climatic cycle where we get 90,000 years of ice age and 10,000 years of a warm period. I think people today just have the expectation that we deserve a perfectly benign climate forever.
I can ask for a £25,000 advance, but then you spend a year writing the book, and £25,000 is a loan against sales, and you can easily spend five years earning out. So that's £25,000 for six years.
Freedom is never granted. It is earned by each generation... In the face of tyranny, cruelty, oppression, extremism, sometimes there is only one choice. When the world looks to America, America looks to you, and you never let her down.
My books have been part of my life forever. They have been good soldiers, boon companions. Every book has survived numerous purges over the years; each book has repeatedly been called onto the carpet and asked to explain itself. I own no book that has not fought the good fight, taken on all comers, and earned the right to remain. If a book is there, it is there for a reason.
I write less about alcohol, less and less and less. You 're an addict - so of course you write about the thing you love most. I loved alcohol the most, loved it more than anybody or anything. That's what I wrote about. And it certainly accounted for some great writing. But it accounted for two or three years of good writing - it would never account for 20 years of good writing. I would have turned into Charles Bukowski. He wrote 10,000 poems and 10 of them were great.
I think that good writing is based on good reading. Maybe it's not about writing today, maybe it's about reading today. Maybe it's about finding the sort of book you would never read.
...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory
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