Quotes from Andrew Ross Sorkin

In truth, a leader should either apologize, mean it and do something about it - or not apologize at all.

I think you tell the story that has to be told. You tell the story that's the truth. You tell the story that readers will be interested in and should know about.

If I have a spare second, I usually catch up on the many magazines I'm behind on or watch the latest movies on demand that I usually missed at the theater. I love magazines. My top three: Graydon Carter's 'Vanity Fair', Adam Moss' 'New York magazine' and David Remnick's 'New Yorker.'

More and more smaller entities, such as Politico or TechCrunch, have been able to come out of nowhere and own entities. Dealbook, like them, now has an even greater opportunity, through additional resources, to drill down and offer even more breaking news and deep analysis of the issues that matter to our audience.

As a journalist, a big part of what you do is search for drama and conflict. And a lot of the backstory with 'Billions' is grounded in my journalistic background.

Perhaps the biggest economic shift during Obama's presidency came from a piece of legislation that wasn't sold as such. On March 21, 2010, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. It was Obama's boldest piece of legislation and the one that will most likely define him.

Corporate tax reform is nice in theory but tough in practice. It most likely requires lower tax rates and the closing of loopholes, which many companies are sure to fight. And whatever new, lower tax rate is determined, there will probably be another country willing to lower its rate further, creating a sad race to zero.

If I could only follow one person on Twitter, it would be Heidi Moore. She's a financial journalist at NPR's Marketplace.

The genre of narrative business books that I love so much - the ones that have a you-are-there quality - was invented, or so it is said, in 1982 by David McClintick, who wrote 'Indecent Exposure,' a rollicking good read about a Hollywood scandal and the ultimate boardroom power struggle at Columbia Pictures.

Why do we have financial crises? Why do banks lose money? If history is any guide, it hasn't often been the result of speculative bets. It has been the result of banks making loans to individuals and businesses who can't pay them back.

Unemployment in Florida peaked at 11.2 percent in 2009, higher than the national average, and the state was a center for home foreclosures.

The greatest economic power might in fact remain in the hands of the Federal Reserve. Economists credit the Fed's policy of keeping interest rates at historic lows with helping to pump up the economy and bring unemployment down.

There's a good argument to be made that companies that are private, where they're run by partnerships, where everybody has true stake in them and they're not playing with other people's money, that by default it's a safer system, because you really have skin in the game. You really own the company.

I got my start in the 'New York Times' because I used to read Stuart Elliot, the advertising columns. I still do. And I read him so religiously, I wanted to work for him before I died.

I started, actually, in journalism when I was - well. I started at the 'New York Times' when I was 18 years old, actually, but really got into journalism when I was 15 years old and had started a sports magazine which was trying to become a national sports magazine.

Unfortunately, I think it's very difficult to separate policy from politics. In a perfect world, in some instances, you probably would want to. In other instances, you'd probably say that the political element is important because it should, in a perfect world, match what the stakeholders need or want, or what the public is after.

I would say that my whole career is effectively trying to be a storyteller within the context of financial news.

I don't want to put words in Geithner's mouth, but I think he is generally against the revolving door of government officials taking jobs with companies that they have overseen or in roles that involve lobbying. At minimum, I'm pretty sure he felt that way about himself.

Traditionally, we think that people with ideas are innovators - that Silicon Valley is the world of ideas. But within the hedge-fund world, they believe that they are men of ideas - that the trade is unto itself one of ideas.

There is a long list of psychology research demonstrating that appearances matter more than most us would care to admit. As shallow as it may be, better-looking people have been shown in various studies to have higher self-esteem and more charisma, are considered more trustworthy and are better negotiators.

In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse.

In truth, the best Bitcoin can hope for is to be a second-rate version of gold, if that.

Debt, we've learned, is the match that lights the fire of every crisis. Every crisis has its own set of villains - pick your favorite: bankers, regulators, central bankers, politicians, overzealous consumers, credit rating agencies - but all require one similar ingredient to create a true crisis: too much leverage.

The lesson of 2008 is that ultimately our markets are driven by confidence.