Bob Greene Quotes

The only thing I want is something I can't have; and that is to know if, 100 years from now, people will still buy my books.

I think the next 50 years are going to present the human race with challenges that so far exceed the limitations of geopolitical boundaries or nationalist identity. We're going to be up against challenges that we can barely fathom at this point. So how we embrace them and deal with them will define a great many things about where we go, but, you know, it's hard to say. We're teetering on the edge, I would say.

As we grow older we think more and more of old persons and of old things and places. As to old persons, it seems as if we never know how much they have to tell until we are old ourselves and they have been gone twenty or thirty years. Once in a while we come upon some survivor of his or her generation that we have overlooked, and feel as if we had recovered one of the lost books of Livy or fished up the golden candlestick from the ooze of the Tiber.

I want to do something splendid… Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead… I think I shall write books.

Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.

I'm a songwriter. So I'm OK. But when I wrote "Stand By Me" as a song and to know that the song will probably be here for hundred and hundreds of years to come, it's great, you know. And it was just simple lyrics.

I think it's really special to be a part of something that people are still watching or thinking about or interested in, or remember fondly many years later. I don't think it's annoying at all.

You may make something you don't think is very important during your lifetime and it'll last for a thousand years.

I don't think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It's instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That's why I write science fiction -- even though the term 'science fiction' excites disdain in certain persons.

I read a fair amount [of science fiction], and you know it was certainly inspirational. I have to pinch myself to think that we might be able to make some of [what I've read in science fiction books] come true.

I can't think of a greater legacy than, "Because you lived, another species survived."

How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.

We're just at the beginning of the beginning of all these kind of changes. There's a sense that all the big things have happened, but relatively speaking, nothing big has happened yet. In 20 years from now we'll look back and say, 'Well, nothing really happened in the last 20 years.'

I want to leave an album behind that is classic, that people in 50 years will refer to and pass on to their children. An album that you never bored of.

I can tell you that my contribution based on my interpretation of the book is unchanged. The other things, in terms of doing the research and following the trail of it, were probably pretty similar to what I would have done then. I think that what makes me celebrate that it took the 10 years is the various other people and contributors that I ended up having on board.

I like to think of my shining tombstone. It gives me, as you might say, something to live for.

I think the important thing is to realize that the establishment of a democracy is sometimes a messy thing and it takes time. Yeah, we've been at it 240 years.

It's been four years. It's been the best four years. It's been wonderful, it's been a privilege to work under Steven Moffat. But I think when you gotta go, you gotta go It's sad, I'm going to miss it. I'm going to miss Comic-Con as well. It wasn't an easy decision, but I dunno, you can't play it forever. And, look, they'll get someone amazing and brilliant, and that's the great thing about the show. It continues, and it will get bigger and better. And you'll forget about me.

I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.

There will come a time when nobody reads my books and no one remembers who I was. And in the meantime, I'll do it my way.

I think the legacy I'll leave on music is just an artist that went out here and gave 100%.

There were years of that stuff that will never leave me. Never. When the bus turned a million miles - that's a lot of traveling. It's really cool to think about. I'm blessed to have traveled a million miles on a tour bus.

I would caution anyone who thinks the solution is to get out to realize that Iraq will be our problem, whether we're there or not, for years to come. It will not be Vietnam; it will not let us go home and lick our wounds.

I like to think that people live on in other people's memories.

A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.