Walter Isaacson Quotes

I had known him since 1984, when he came to Manhattan to have lunch with Time’s editors and extol his new Macintosh. He was petulant even then, attacking a Time correspondent for having wounded him wi...

I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the w...

That spring Larry Ellison saw Amelio at a party and introduced him to the technology journalist Gina Smith, who asked how Apple was doing. You know, Gina, Apple is like a ship, Amelio answered. That s...

Jobs and Kottke became serious vegetarians during their freshman year. Steve got into it even more than I did, said Kottke. He was living off Roman Meal cereal. They would go shopping at a farmers’ co...

In the middle of Lisa’s eighth-grade year, her teachers called Jobs. There were serious problems, and it was probably best for her to move out of her mother’s house. So Jobs went on a walk with Lisa,...

To put anything off-limits. I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was twenty-three and the way I handled that, he said. But I don’t have any skeleto...

There never was a good war or a bad peace.4

Occasionally Leonardo appended a moral lesson to the entry, such as this: The oyster, when the moon is full, opens itself wide, and when the crab looks in he throws in a stone or seaweed and the oyste...

Up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised. MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discovered their relationship in 1986 and became

I was on one of my fruitarian diets Steve Jobs recalled I had just comeback from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge of the word 'computer', plus it wou...

I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences.

We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the cloud—streams your music and videos from the cloud, stores your pictures and information, and maybe even your medical data.

Jobs later explained, We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little...

It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance. They’ve become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at th...

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.

Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution

In September 1998, one month after they met with Bechtolsheim, Page and Brin incorporated their company, opened a bank account, and cashed his check. On the wall of the garage they put up a whiteboard...

In other words, there is no single underlying reality that is independent of our observations. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is, Bohr declared. Physics concer...

Wentworth arrived in Paris in mid-December, just as the Americans were meeting with Vergennes, and sent a missive worthy of a British spy: a gentleman who wished to meet him, it said, could be found t...

Instead, this time he made what he called a slight modification to his theory. To keep the matter in the universe from imploding, Einstein added a repulsive force: a little addition to his general rel...