Steve Jobs

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of, but I don't have any skeletons in my closet that can't be allowed out.

He [Steve Jobs' father] loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn't see.

I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn't cost much.

Steve is very much Zen. It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.

I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin, and you can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important – creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

The only reason I shone was that everyone else was so bad.

If you trust him, you can do things. If he's decided that something should happen, then he's just going to make it happen.

He [Mike Markkula] emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Picasso had a saying – 'good artists copy, great artists steal' – and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Everything you've ever done in your life is shit, so why don't you come work for me?

Because I didn't know it couldn't be done, I was enabled to do it.

I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn't have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn't have to worry about money.

You did the impossible, because you didn't realize it was impossible.

We learned to interpret 'This is shit' to actually be a question that means, 'Tell me why this is the best way to do it.'

The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.

I've learned over the years that when you have really good people you don't have to baby them. By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.

The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious.

Great art stretches the taste, it doesn't follow tastes.

A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it.

We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we're going to be here.

He [Steve Jobs] really never knew much about technology, but he had an amazing instinct for what works.

Bill [Gates] is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he's more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people's ideas.

It's too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players. The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can't indulge B players.

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.

The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, 'Bye. I have to go. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here.' And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.

I will solve your problem, and you will pay me. You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, either way you will pay me.

My view is that people are creative animals and will figure out clever new ways to use tools that the inventor never imagined.

He [Steve Jobs] was so weirdly charismatic that you almost had to get deprogrammed after you talked to him.

He [Steve Jobs] believed that great harvests came from arid sources, pleasure from restraint.

I am a reflection of what I do.

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.

I can't tell you the number of versions of Toy Story I saw before it came out. It eventually became a form of torture.

There's no yacht in my future. I've never done this for the money.

They cared about making money – for themselves mainly, and also for Apple – rather than making great products.

Don't you understand that Steve doesn't know anything about technology? He's just a super salesman. I can't believe you're making such a stupid decision... He doesn't know anything about engineering, and 99% of what he says and thinks is wrong. What the hell are you buying that garbage for?"

He [Gareth Chang] wasn't terrible, just a zero.

I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company.

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That's true for companies, and it's true for products.

People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint.

I always understood the beauty of things made by hand. I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it.

It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.

Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.

You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don't run into major disagreements.

Skate where the puck's going, not where it's been.

Just tell them if they fuck with us, they'll never get another fucking dime from this company, ever.

On too many weekends, when he wasn't making me watch new scenes from Toy Story, he made me go to the warehouse and look at the mockups for the store. He was obsessed by every detail of the aesthetic and the service experience. It got to the point where I said, 'Steve I'm not coming to see you if you're going to make me go to the store again.'

If something isn't right, you can't just ignore it and say you'll fix it later. That's what other companies do.

If you need slides, it shows you don't know what you're talking about.

In the end, you just don't want someone else to control a big part of the user experience.

When you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow', and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas.

My goal has always been not only to make great products, but to build great companies.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products, and that's not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot. And frankly, we don't settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we're wrong and the courage to change. And I think, regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.

I thought he [Steve Jobs] was calling to say something nice about it [Comcast's high-definition cable service]. Instead, he told me 'It sucks'

By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others' work and belittle their motivations?

Living with a disease like this, and all the pain, constantly reminds you of your own mortality, and that can do strange things to your brain if you're not careful. You don't make plans more than a year out, and that's bad. You need to force yourself to plan as if you will live for many years.

I didn't think I would be alive when it got done. But that made me so sad, and I decided that working on the design was fun to do, and maybe I have a shot at being alive when it's done. If I stop work on the boat and then I make it alive for another two years, I would be really pissed. So I've kept going.

Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It's now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it.

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.

Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. [...] People don't know what they want until you show it to them.

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 work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That's how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before.