Greenblatt Quotes & Sayings

The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone. — Stephen Greenblatt

We had some ups and downs, creatively, as the season went on, which is true of any show. If you compound that by the production that we go through, in terms of original songwriting and recordings, and all that is happening simultaneously, where we didn't do as good a job, as I hope we do this year, is the arcing of the storylines and the consistency of going in one direction with a character, and continuing in a really interesting way with that arc. — Robert Greenblatt

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place. — Stephen Greenblatt

I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography! — Stephen Greenblatt

It's always bittersweet when you have a show that you own, that's against you. It's against one of our favorite comedies for NBC. And yes, that's part of the business model. House was on the Fox network for a number of years and was such a great business for the NBC-owned studio. That's part of what we're also trying to build. Hopefully, Mindy will help do that for us. — Robert Greenblatt

My goal is to buy a company at a low multiple to normal earnings power several years out and that the company earns good returns on capital at that level of normal earnings. A holding period of more than one year also works quite well as the factors are persistent in years 2 and 3. — Joel Greenblatt

The shows you can do in cable are just more buzzworthy and are about subject matter that's more unusual or dark. And broadcast shows tend to be more mainstream or middle-of-the-road. — Robert Greenblatt

Value investing doesn't always work. The market doesn't always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn't work. And that is a very good thing. The fact that our value approach doesn't work over periods of time is precisely the reason why it continues to work over the long term. — Joel Greenblatt

I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me. — Stephen Greenblatt

Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion. — Stephen Greenblatt

There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.
Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being. — Stephen Greenblatt

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity. — Stephen Greenblatt

Choosing individual stocks without any idea of what you're looking for is like running through a dynamite factory with a burning match. You may live, but you're still an idiot. — Joel Greenblatt

he "obliterated by the praiseworthy use he made of leisure the stain he had incurred through his active exertions in former days. — Stephen Greenblatt

The way we make money as a group is that we don't pay a lot for anything, and most of the stocks we buy have low expectations. — Joel Greenblatt

It just seems logical that sticking to investing in only a small number of companies that you understand well, rather than moving down the list to your thirtieth or fiftieth favorite pick, would create a much greater potential to earn above-average investment returns. — Joel Greenblatt

We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment's peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day. — Stephen Greenblatt

Place of the philosopher the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages. — Stephen Greenblatt

Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig — Stephen Greenblatt

Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago. — Stephen Greenblatt

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing. — Stephen Greenblatt

Weizenbaum did not acknowledge the beauty of the hacker devotion itself ... orthe very idealism of the Hacker Ethic. He had not seen, as Ed Fredkin had, Stew Nelson composing code on the TECO editor while Greenblatt and Gosper watched: without any of the three saying a word, Nelson was entertaining the others, encoding assembly-language tricks which to them, with their absolute mastery of that PDP-6 "language," had the same effect as hilariously incisive jokes. And after every few instructions there would be another punch line in this sublime form of communication ... The scene was a demonstration of sharing which Fredkin never forgot. — Anonymous

Over the long term, despite significant drops from time to time, stocks (especially an intelligently selected stock portfolio) will be one of your best investment options. The trick is to GET to the long term. Think in terms of 5 years, 10 years and longer. Do your planning and asset allocation ahead of time. Choose a portion of your assets to invest in the stock market - and stick with it! Yes, the bad times will come, but over the truly long term, the good times will win out - and I hope the lessons from 2008 will help get you there to enjoy them. — Joel Greenblatt

No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered. — Stephen Greenblatt

I began with the desire to speak with the dead. — Stephen Greenblatt

To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death, he wrote, is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed. He gave voice as well to a thought I had not yet quite allowed myself, even inwardly, to articulate: to inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel. — Stephen Greenblatt

I'll take any vampire fans I can get. Dracula isn't a serial killer story. — Robert Greenblatt

Instead, he wrote, quoting Lucretius, there were multiple worlds, where the seeds of things, in their infinite numbers, would certainly combine to form other races of men, other creatures. Each of the fixed stars observed in the sky is a sun, scattered through limitless space. Many of these are accompanied by satellites that revolve around them as the earth revolves around our sun. The universe is not all about us, about our behavior and our destiny; we are only a tiny piece of something inconceivably larger. And that should not make us shrink in fear. Rather, we should embrace the world in wonder and gratitude and awe. — Stephen Greenblatt

The bookworm - "one of the teeth of time," as Hooke put it - is no longer familiar to ordinary readers, but the ancients knew it very well. — Stephen Greenblatt

The big picture is: the main thing you should be concerned about in the future are incremental returns on capital going forward. As it turns out, past history of a good return on capital is a good proxy for this but obviously not foolproof. I think this is an area where thoughtful analysis can add value to any simple ranking/screening strategy such as the magic formula. When doing in depth analysis of companies, I care very much about long term earnings power, not necessarily so much about the volatility of that earnings power but about my certainty of "normal" earnings power over time. — Joel Greenblatt

I've just always been a proponent of having a lot of diversity in the shows I've done. I just think that's the world we live in. — Robert Greenblatt

I don't know too many people that are good at timing the market relative to macro-economic events. — Joel Greenblatt

The beauty of cable is you could program for 18-year-old twins and get a hit show on cable. — Robert Greenblatt

Look down, not up, when making your initial investment decision. If you don't lose money, most of the remaining alternatives are good ones. — Joel Greenblatt

I have throbbing headaches about a lot of things, and Howard Stern isn't one of them. — Robert Greenblatt

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing. — Stephen Greenblatt

What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language - the crude style of the Gospels' Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic - but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism. — Stephen Greenblatt

Libraries, museums, and schools are fragile institutions. — Stephen Greenblatt

What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off. — Stephen Greenblatt

Here is part of the tradeoff with diversification. You must be diversified enough to survive bad times or bad luck so that skill and good process can have the chance to pay off over the long term. — Joel Greenblatt

I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter. — Stephen Greenblatt

One of the best investors around, Joel Greenblatt, has written a popular, charming and funny book about investing in great companies at low P/E multiples. To simplify an already simple book, great companies are generally measured as companies that can generate lots of profit without requiring a lot of capital. This means that they have high ROEs. — David Einhorn

I think the exercise of trying to figure out how to simplify concepts has been incredibly helpful to me over the last 13 years of teaching and I hope my students have benefited from it. — Joel Greenblatt

First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so. — Stephen Greenblatt

Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives they have. — Stephen Greenblatt

The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance - and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig - is to understand the nature of the occasion. — Stephen Greenblatt

I remember being at Greenblatt's on Sunset, and some guy just walked straight up to me, and he had some bling on and whatever, and said something about a party down in Malibu and asked if I would jump in his car and go to the party. All I could think was, 'Who are you? I don't know you, and I don't care about how good your car is.' — Yvonne Strahovski

Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them. — Stephen Greenblatt

Poems are difficult to silence. — Stephen Greenblatt

Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life. — Stephen Greenblatt

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet. — Stephen Greenblatt

Spectators could, for an additional fee, sit on the stage - something not permitted at the Globe. With stage seating, audience members could show off their finery to maximum effect, and the practice was lucrative; but it contained an obvious risk of distraction. Stephen Greenblatt relates an occasion in which a nobleman who had secured a perch on the stage spied a friend entering across the way and strode through the performance to greet him. When rebuked by an actor for his thoughtlessness, the nobleman slapped the impertinent fellow and the audience rioted. — Bill Bryson

First we are children to our parents, then parents to our children, then parents to our parents, then children to our children — Milton Greenblatt

The strategy of putting all your eggs in one basket and watching that basket is less risky than you might think. — Joel Greenblatt

We are busy surviving, herding, fixating on what just happened, and being overconfident! — Joel Greenblatt

The more confidence I have in each one of my stock picks, the fewer companies I need to own in my portfolio to feel comfortable. — Joel Greenblatt

Figure out what something is worth and pay a lot less. — Joel Greenblatt

There is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance. — Stephan Greenblatt

I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about. — Stephen Greenblatt

I wait until an investment idea is so good, it hits me over the head like an anvil. — Joel Greenblatt

The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness. — Stephen Greenblatt

The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views. — Stephen Greenblatt

What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world. — Stephen Greenblatt

If I plug my estimates into the Magic Formula, and it comes out cheap, that's good. — Joel Greenblatt

I think we're going to transition with our comedy programming, trying to broaden the audience and broaden what the network does. Those Thursday comedies, which the critics love and we love, tend to be a bit more narrow than we'd ultimately like, as we go forward. — Robert Greenblatt

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man. — Stephen Greenblatt

companies that achieve a high return on capital are likely to have a special advantage of some kind. That special advantage keeps competitors from destroying the ability to earn above-average profits. — Joel Greenblatt

I would categorically not rule out that it's not the last season of Community. Does that make sense? I would love nothing more than for Community to have a following on Friday, and to be able to continue it. — Robert Greenblatt

My dream as a teenager was to run a movie studio, as in the old studio system. — Robert Greenblatt

Every so often, it's time to make a change with a showrunner; you evaluate the creative and how the show is run, how the writing staff works. — Robert Greenblatt

Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life. — Stephen Greenblatt

Somehow, when ownership interests are divided into shares that bounce around with Mr. Market's moods, individuals and professionals start to think about and measure risk in strange ways. When short-term thinking and overly complicated statistics get involved, owning many companies that you know very little about starts to sound safer than owning stakes in five to eight companies that have good businesses, predictable futures, and bargain prices. — Joel Greenblatt

My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish. — Stephen Greenblatt

Comedy is king for me; it's the genre that everyone loves. — Robert Greenblatt

Something out of the ordinary course of business is taking place that creates an investment opportunity. The list of corporate events that can result in big profits for you runs the gamut - spinoffs, mergers, restructurings, rights offerings, bankruptcies, liquidations, asset sales, distributions. — Joel Greenblatt

I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough. — Stephen Greenblatt

Most teachers of the humanities lived itinerant lives, traveling from city to city, giving lectures on a few favorite authors, and then restlessly moving on, in the hope of finding new patrons. — Stephen Greenblatt

Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know. And so far will I trust thee, — Stephen Greenblatt

I'm inordinately proud of Smash, on so many levels. The complexity of producing that show, every week, is just incredible. As a television producer and as a Broadway producer, which I once was, I am in awe of what we can do on that show, every week. — Robert Greenblatt

On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of — Stephen Greenblatt

In every soap, at the end of the season, relationships end and people leave the show. You look at characters and evaluate whether they're great characters or not, and whether they have a future in the show. And we did all of that. — Robert Greenblatt

But I never listen to music while I'm writing. — Stephen Greenblatt

The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind. — Stephen Greenblatt

The quintessential emblem of religion - and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core - is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.
Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son. — Stephen Greenblatt

The key point, as Epicurus' disciple Lucretius wrote in verses of unrivalled beauty, was to abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and to turn instead toward the cultivation of pleasure. — Stephen Greenblatt

First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him. — Stephen Greenblatt

But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don't know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth. — Stephen Greenblatt

The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his fellow monks. He would feel that things were better somewhere else, that he was wasting his life, that everything was stale and pointless, that he was suffocating. — Stephen Greenblatt

Remember, it's the quality of your ideas not the quantity that will result in the big money. — Joel Greenblatt

I wanted to hold onto and exploit the power of narrative. This is not only a book about a great storyteller, but there have to be stories about the storyteller. — Stephen Greenblatt

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough. — Stephen Greenblatt

the government-controlled Saudi daily Al-Riyadh published a column declaring that "the Jews' spilling human blood to prepare pastry for their holidays is a well-established fact. — Stephen Greenblatt

affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? — Stephen Greenblatt

No. Honour hath not skill in surgery, then? No. — Stephen Greenblatt

If you spend your energies looking for and analysing situations not closely followed by other informed investors, your chance of finding bargains greatly increases. — Joel Greenblatt

Value investing strategies have worked for years and everyone's known about them. They continue to work because it's hard for people to do, for two main reasons. First, the companies that show up on the screens can be scary and not doing so well, so people find them difficult to buy. Second, there can be one-, two- or three-year periods when a strategy like this doesn't work. Most people aren't capable of sticking it out through that. — Joel Greenblatt

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. — Stephen Greenblatt

You call me misbeliever, cut-throat, dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine, — Stephen Greenblatt

nine categories of value ideas: Graham-style deep value, Greenblatt-style magic formula, small-cap value, sum-of-the-parts or hidden value, superinvestor favorites, jockey stocks, special situations, equity stubs, and international value investments. — John Mihaljevic

There's a clarity that comes with great ideas: You can [easily and simply] explain why something's a great business, how and why it's cheap, why it's cheap for temporary reasons and how, on a normal basis, it should be trading at a much higher level. You're never sitting there on the 40th page of your spreadsheet, as Buffett would say, agonizing over whether you should buy or not. — Joel Greenblatt