Robert Greene's Reading List

"I must have been 15 or so I when got a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince … It had no relevance to my life in high school, obviously, but I loved the brutal realism of it. I loved the fact that he was looking at human beings as if we are these animals that we are, and he was analyzing it without all the usual guilt – all the usual moralism that’s going on in the world. He was just presenting us as we are. I didn’t really understand experientially what he was talking about but the style, the cla..."

"It’s the most beautiful thing you can ever read, because you’re reading about our history as humans some 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece. And you’ve got this narrator who’s so modern, who’s someone who could be somebody who’s not sitting right next to you, who has this very clear perspective. And he’s describing these events so far in the past – they’re so dramatic and they’re so exciting and he’s analyzing it brilliantly. I wish we had a handful of writers to this day who could be like tha..."