By now in his mid-30s and depressed about his career, Mr. In the mid-1990s, he spent a couple of months in Italy, where he met Joost Elffers, a successful book packager, and Mr. Then he came back to Los Angeles to try his luck at screenwriting, an “irrational” move, he said, prompted by a romanticized view of the screenwriter in “Sunset Boulevard.” He spent a few years in New York at Esquire magazine, a few more as a freelance writer and English teacher abroad. He wanted to be a writer from childhood, he said, but “I kind of got a little lost.” After college, he drifted in Europe, working at various jobs. Greene’s career took a similarly circuitous path. The only thing that got rid of it was something that was kind of painful, that took four or five months.” “I’d been trying all these other quick fixes. “The book is about how, through time, you can almost do anything,” he said. The methodical approach reflects one of the themes of “Mastery.” Biller, a health-food enthusiast, suggested he eliminate sugar from his diet. He tried numerous solutions for his stomach troubles, he said, but nothing worked until Ms. Greene typically reads 200 or more books and then makes notes using a complicated index-card system that could give anyone an ulcer. “I think it was from all the writing, the stress of finishing the book.”ĭuring the research he does before writing, Mr. “They call it a leaky gut,” he said of the condition he has been suffering from. Greene is happy simply to have mastered a nervous stomach.
Greene has fake fossils made by his artist sister, Leslie Green.įor his part, Mr. Where the psychoanalyst had priceless antiquities on his bookshelves, Mr. Greene’s office, which he said was modeled on Sigmund Freud’s in Vienna, with the same daybed and furniture configuration, though it is smaller in scale and more midcentury in feeling. Greene’s grandfather, an accompanist for Judy Garland and other golden-age stars. In the living room is a Chinese Art Deco rug and a piano, an ode to Mr. He and his live-in girlfriend, Anna Biller, a filmmaker, have decorated the rooms with vintage Heywood-Wakefield furniture and new couches and chairs upholstered to look old.Īs Ms. Many of the early film studios were nearby, he said, and he imagines his current abode is the kind of place a scriptwriter might have toiled in. His domestic setup, in fact, is modeled on a lowly figure in the Hollywood food chain. “To me, my house is always recreating what I lost in youth.” “I want a one-story house that has the same kinds of dimensions,” he said. Greene, 53, may be fascinated by power, but he prefers to live much as he did when he was growing up middle-class in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Greene asked, adding, almost apologetically, “I would feel very uncomfortable in the glass house on a hill.” Is this the same Robert Greene who wrote a book with 50 Cent that draws life lessons from slinging crack? “I just love the colors of the leaves and the scent.” Greene said, holding a leaf between his fingers. “I don’t know if you’re into gardens and plants, but I’m proud of this tree,” Mr. Nor does the author himself, a mild bookish type in glasses who greeted a visitor on a recent afternoon by eagerly showing off the Vietnamese champaca he had planted on his front lawn.
Greene’s home, a one-story Spanish bungalow on a quiet street in the Los Feliz neighborhood, doesn’t conform to the image suggested by his books. Upon learning that the author makes his home in Los Angeles, one imagines a ruthless power broker, peering down at the city from one of those modernist dwellings high above the Sunset Strip, the architecture all hard surfaces and empty rooms.īut Mr.
Greene’s specialty is analyzing the lives and philosophies of historical figures like Sun Tzu and Napoleon, and extracting from them tips on how to manipulate people and situations - a cutthroat worldview that has earned him a devoted following among a like-minded readership of rappers, drug dealers and corporate executives. ROBERT GREENE, the author of books like “The 48 Laws of Power,” “The 33 Strategies of War” and “Mastery” (his latest, out this month), is a walking reminder that writers often lead very different lives off the page.