Top 50 Lee Goldberg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Standing up for what you believe in comes at a price but backing down exacts a toll that your soul never stops paying.”

— Lee Goldberg

3. “It’s a tough job being somebody’s personal assistant. You have to anwser their phone, manage their correspondence, run their errands, pay their bills, arrange their schedule, and basically do whatever tasks, menial to major, they are too busy or self absorbed or distranted or pampered or disinterested to do themselves.”

— Lee Goldberg

4. “Guilt and fear are a kind of rot. It spreads unless it’s cleaned. And there’s only one way to do that.”

— Lee Goldberg

5. “Mulholland Drive is a two-lane, serpentine road that runs along the crest of the mountains and is named after the guy who built a two-hundred-mile aqueduct to drain water from the Northern California delta down to Los Angeles just so developers could get rich building homes in a place that otherwise is inhospitable to human life. The whole city is a carefully.”

— Lee Goldberg

6. “This is humor: A Japanese woman experiences discomfort in her eye, so she goes to see a qualified ophthalmologist. After a thorough examination, the doctor tells the Japanese woman that she has a cataract. She says, ‘No, I don’t. I have a Lincoln Continental.”

— Lee Goldberg

7. “He felt like Rambo even though he was built like Dumbo.”

— Lee Goldberg

8. “Perception is reality, so it’s up to us to create the perception.”

— Lee Goldberg

9. “It takes a lot of energy just to deal with life when you are neurotic and obsessive-compulsive.”

— Lee Goldberg

10. “Nipples are a fact of life. We all have them.”

— Lee Goldberg

11. “You’re owed a refund on your manhood.”

— Lee Goldberg

12. “When a bird crapped on my window, he called 911.”

— Lee Goldberg

13. “Figuring out the solutions to puzzling mysteries seems to come so fast and so naturally for him, we just shake our heads in wonder and chalk it up as miraculous. We don’t stop to consider the mental and emotional resources he has to marshal to pull that “miracle” off.”

— Lee Goldberg

14. “They could be mistaken for a father and daughter who liked to carry Glocks.”

— Lee Goldberg

15. “Ian had always suspected that the happiest day of a survivalist’s life would be the one when the world ended. Now he knew it was true.”

— Lee Goldberg

16. “After that experience, I immediately enrolled Julie in tae kwon do class, despite her protests. I wanted to be sure that if she were ever attacked, her instincts would take over, and that her instincts would kick ass.”

— Lee Goldberg

17. “It also made the government secretly eager to go far beyond that, at least until Edward Snowden ruined things.”

— Lee Goldberg

18. “The driver’s licenses weren’t the only things that had RFID chips in them. These days almost everything did, from breakfast cereal boxes to key chains.”

— Lee Goldberg

19. “He had plump, rosy cheeks and a thin beard that looked like it had been drawn on his round, chubby face with a Sharpie to indicate that he actually had a chin.”

— Lee Goldberg

20. “Numbers are a lot like people. They each have a story. They interact with one another. They entertain. They inform. They deceive. They can create happiness or inflict enormous pain. You have to know how to get them to talk.”

— Lee Goldberg

21. “This is a crazy world, Margo. Maybe you need t o be a little crazy to see it.”

— Lee Goldberg

22. “Cross knew from reading the intelligence reports on her that in her private life she liked a more visceral experience, one that would make Christian Grey or the Marquis de Sade cower.”

— Lee Goldberg

23. “The pictures were the only items in the file that weren’t complete fiction.”

— Lee Goldberg

24. “Nonsense is the new sense. To truly understand the world we are in today, you have to be a writer, or an actor, or a lunatic.”

— Lee Goldberg

25. “His bet was wrong. The reason was that the signal from the helmet cameras was being intentionally distorted at the source.”

— Lee Goldberg

26. “They use the term ‘ripped from the headlines’ for their stories because it sounds a lot better than ’plagiarized from the New York Times because we have no imagination.”

— Lee Goldberg

27. “Spinelessness was the lack of the inner strength to endure the anguish or pain required to overcome a major obstacle or a difficult challenge.”

— Lee Goldberg

28. “Instead, you let your massive ego get in the way. You wanted center stage, the spotlight on you, over everything else, even if staying behind the curtain would have ultimately been in your best interest.”

— Lee Goldberg

29. “I like that you’re confident but not overconfident,” Duncan said. “Smart people are the ones who know how stupid they are.”

— Lee Goldberg

30. “The ambience was so masculine that infertile men could increase their sperm count just by walking in the door.”

— Lee Goldberg

31. “He was a clean-cut man in his fifties who appeared so wholesome that Ian was sure he could pass as a high school teacher, a Mormon missionary, or the reliable love interest in one of those Hallmark Channel movies.”

— Lee Goldberg

32. “The bad guys are whoever it is who think they are better than everybody else. This world needs to be turned upside down.”

— Lee Goldberg

33. “Even when the couple disabled “location history” or “location services” in an app, their wishes were ignored. The couple was more closely monitored than a paroled child molester with a tamperproof GPS tracker around his ankle.”

— Lee Goldberg

34. “This needed to be handled with finesse, but you have all the finesse of the Hulk on meth.”

— Lee Goldberg

35. “The kitchen island, like the one in the sting house, was absolutely enormous, a second kitchen unto itself. There was no room for one like that in Eve’s kitchen and she felt a pang of island envy.”

— Lee Goldberg

36. “The only thing less secure than airplane Wi-Fi is running naked through Compton holding all of your money, jewelry, and credit cards in a baggie.”

— Lee Goldberg

37. “The sun was setting, giving the smog a sickly glow that made the landscape look to Eve like an alien world populated by creatures that breathed radiant vomit.”

— Lee Goldberg

38. “The bar had the ambiance of a Chevron station mini-mart and the odor of someone deep-frying fish in a men’s locker room.”

— Lee Goldberg

39. “She’s keyed up,” Duncan said as Eve pulled up to the driveway. “You better talk to her, woman-to-woman.” “Good idea, because you know we don’t even have to speak to each other,” Eve said, putting the car into park. “Our uteruses can communicate telepathically.”

— Lee Goldberg

40. “His tan rivaled George Hamilton’s and his straight white teeth were so bright, she was sure he could stand on a cliff during a storm as a beacon to guide ships at sea.”

— Lee Goldberg

41. “The problem with all of her mental notes was they somehow got erased the moment after she made them. She supposed she could start writing them down on actual paper, but she was afraid if anybody saw them, they’d think she was fighting early Alzheimer’s.”

— Lee Goldberg

42. “Three men dead, two people injured, and a civilian traumatized by having to kill a man. The department is probably facing tens of millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements. Tell me why I shouldn’t walk out of here with somebody’s badge in my pocket for this?”

— Lee Goldberg

43. “Exactly. If you keep up this pace much longer, you’ll burn out, one way or another. Your body will quit on you, or you’ll make a big mistake or take a foolish risk that either kills you, kills your career, kills somebody else, or all of the above. You’ve come pretty damn close to that twice already.”

— Lee Goldberg

44. “Eve was sure he was saluted at birth by the obstetrician instead of spanked.”

— Lee Goldberg

45. “The house looked to her like the ugly offspring from a drunken one-night stand between a farmhouse and a Quonset hut.”

— Lee Goldberg

46. “Eve knew what a grip was. Her sister’s father was a grip who dated their mother for a few weeks.”

— Lee Goldberg

47. “Smoking saved me. The chemicals couldn’t get past the charcoal in my lungs.”

— Lee Goldberg

48. “Of course it is. Likes are power,” Mintner said, and looked at Eve. “You know what I’m saying. Isn’t that how you became a homicide detective?”

— Lee Goldberg

49. “Get the United States to start a war so they won’t intrude in yours.”

— Lee Goldberg

50. “I’ll see if we’re done with your truck and get you a ride home if we are.”

— Lee Goldberg