Quotes from Lawrence Grobel

So I can only conclude that American democracy inherently does not want good leadership. We always passed over the very great men we had like Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, John Fremont, and the people after the Civil War like Carl Shurz. We pass them up because we don't want first-class men in that position, we want somebody who is a stupid bum like us. We're afraid of good leadership until a time of crisis

At one point in one's life you get a sense of your own mortality. You view death in a certain way. From that point on you look at your fellow man with a new understanding. I have some feelings for it now. They say it happens in your mid-thirties. Sometimes I have a fantasy of my corpse being carried around in a box, people mourning me. Saying, "We shouldn't have treated him so badly.

Reading about Shelley and Byron I get awfully fed up, realizing that these men never did a day's work in their lives; they lived off the system, were free to travel all around Europe with entourages if necessary, never wrote about a guy earning a living. That is not the world I knew, that is not the world I want to be a part of, and by and large it's not a world I'm interested in. How

What about golf? It's something else. It has its own unique niche in society. The gala country club life. It's a delightful game for elderly executives or even young executives who want to make big deals about selling manufactured products. I can't take it seriously. Deep-sea

I shall prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet.

If you can't be friends with a lover, then forget it. It's not going to work.

The relationships that we have with writers are quite a thing; they're different from the ones we have with actors or musicians or composers or politicians. Everything for me is the writer; without him, I don't exist. So he is first. The actor gets all the fame and glory, but I don't know about endurance.

Everybody has their field. My field is the muktiple murderer.

Everybody has their field. My field is the multiple murderer.

It's pathetic. It's a bottomless pit. A barrel that has no floor. He must be a man who has an ever-crumbling estimation of himself. He's constantly filling himself up.