Top 81 Greenblatt Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
Stephen Greenblatt
#3. 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
#4. The strategy of putting all your eggs in one basket and watching that basket is less risky than you might think.
Joel Greenblatt
#5. Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
Stephen Greenblatt
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.
Stephen Greenblatt
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. I'll take any vampire fans I can get. Dracula isn't a serial killer story.
Robert Greenblatt
#13. You call me misbeliever, cut-throat, dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
Stephen Greenblatt
#14. I wait until an investment idea is so good, it hits me over the head like an anvil.
Joel Greenblatt
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know. And so far will I trust thee,
Stephen Greenblatt
#18. 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
#19. In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
Stephen Greenblatt
#20. 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
#22. First we are children to our parents, then parents to our children, then parents to our parents, then children to our children
Milton Greenblatt
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
Stephen Greenblatt
#27. 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
#28. The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness.
Stephen Greenblatt
#29. 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
#30. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Remember, it's the quality of your ideas not the quantity that will result in the big money.
Joel Greenblatt
#39. If I plug my estimates into the Magic Formula, and it comes out cheap, that's good.
Joel Greenblatt
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. We are busy surviving, herding, fixating on what just happened, and being overconfident!
Joel Greenblatt
#44. he "obliterated by the praiseworthy use he made of leisure the stain he had incurred through his active exertions in former days.
Stephen Greenblatt
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I have throbbing headaches about a lot of things, and Howard Stern isn't one of them.
Robert Greenblatt
#50. 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
#51. The beauty of cable is you could program for 18-year-old twins and get a hit show on cable.
Robert Greenblatt
#52. My dream as a teenager was to run a movie studio, as in the old studio system.
Robert Greenblatt
#53. 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
#54. Figure out what something is worth and pay a lot less.
Joel Greenblatt
#55. 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
#56. 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
#58. I don't know too many people that are good at timing the market relative to macro-economic events.
Joel Greenblatt
#59. 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
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.
Stephen Greenblatt
#67. There is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance.
Stephan Greenblatt
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#77. 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
#78. The secret to investing is to figure out the value of something - and then pay a lot less.
Joel Greenblatt
#81. The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
Stephen Greenblatt
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