Robert Gottlieb Quotes

I saw Roland Barthes's 'Mourning Diary' at a bookshop, and I felt it was like I was destined to see the book. I read it all in one go while I was in the shop. The book was mind-blowing.

The film that changed my life is a 1951 film by Vittorio De Sica, 'Miracle in Milan.' It's a remarkable comment on slums, poverty and aspiration.

The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.

There's something very visceral about watching people beg for money. It's powerful.

The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.

In 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time. It changed my life. I came back home, told my mother, 'I'd like to live and work in a village.' Mother went into a coma.

I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.

Books are my very favorite gift to give. If you give a book to someone and they really respond to it, you feel you've actually changed their life in some way.

In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that.

The last thing the theatre owners wanted was for people who spent $200 to see 'Les Miserables' to come out again and see the real miserable children of America, right there on the sidewalk.

I remember reading the book in high school and always thinking of Gatsby as this strong, stoic, suave, mysterious man who had everything under control. But when I read it as an adult, I realised he is a hollow man, a shell of a person trying to find meaning, who is not completely in touch with reality.

I can't remember how old I was, maybe 13, 14, and to see these fellows and hear their stories and to see life come to such a drab ending - my God, a poorhouse in those days was something. You would have to be inert not to respond to it.

Life is just like a book. Only after you've read it do you know how it ends. It is when we are at the end of life that we know how our life ran. Mine, until now, has been black. As black as my skin. Black as the garbage dump where I live.

There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful.

The best way to watch Breaking Bad is in the fetal position, sobbing.

I never would've imagined in the first part of my life that I could've stood up and said anything. The war in Vietnam changed me. I was so angry. Some of my speeches probably weren't well considered.

Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.

At last I came to college. I rushed for it with the outstretched arms of youth's aching hunger to give and take of life's deepest, and highest, and I came against the solid wall of the well-fed, well-dressed world - the frigid whitewashed wall of cleanliness. ... How I pinched, and scraped, and starved myself, to save enough to come to college! Every cent of the tuition fee I paid was drops of sweat and blood from underpaid laundry work. And what did I get for it? A crushed spirit, a broken heart, a stinging sense of poverty that I never felt before.

Poverty is the fundamental cause of most of the physical, moral and economic ills of humanity.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

I often wonder how we can make the more fortunate in this country fully aware of the fact that the problem of the unemployed is not a mechanical one. It is a problem alive and throbbing with human pain.

A couple of years ago I picked up New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto's "The Heart That Bleeds," which is reportage from Latin America in the 1990s. You can predict that some books will give you a thrill, but you can't predict the books that will hit you hard. It is a little bit like falling in love.

Poetry can startle you, awaken you, make you fall in love, take your breath away. When those words sink in, you'll never look at your life or your journey the same way again.

So long as there are poor, - I am poor, - So long as there are prisons, - I am a prisoner, - So long as there are sick, - I am weak, - So long as there is ignorance, - I must learn the truth, - So long as there is hate, - I must love, - So long as there is hunger, - I am famished. - Such is the identification Our Divine Lord would have us make with all whom He made in love and for love.

I just understand... I mean this may sound kind of bigheaded, bullheaded, or cumbersome, but when people say they've had a really deep experience with the record, like it caused a divorce or it like...I've gotten all these stories.