Quotes from Walter Isaacson

they'd ever enjoyed. Almost everyone mentioned some nice experience at a Four Seasons or Ritz-Carlton hotel.

But even if merely designed to amuse his patrons, they hint at something deeper, providing a glimpse into the psychological torments swirling in the psyche of the artist playing the entertainer. 39

Head of Disney Studios, clashed with Eisner and resigned

fired, abused, abandoned, or otherwise infuriated, and I feared he would not be comfortable with my getting them to talk. And indeed he did turn out to be skittish when word trickled back to him of

Both my parents got me. They felt a lot of responsibility once they sensed that I was special. They found ways to keep feeding me stuff and putting me in better schools. They were willing to defer to my needs.

The combination of GNU and Linux created an operating system that has been ported to more hardware platforms, ranging from the world's ten biggest supercomputers to embedded systems in mobile phones, than any other operating system. "Linux is subversive," wrote Eric Raymond. "Who would have thought that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want toe die to get there. And Yet death is the destination we all share.

new, used, salvaged, and surplus components crammed onto warrens of shelves, dumped unsorted into bins, and piled in an

the importance of spawning new

By the end of 2010, Apple had sold ninety million iPhones, and it reaped more than half of the total profits generated in the global cell phone market.

Be open to mystery. Not everything needs sharp lines.

allowed the illusion of documents piling on top of each other and overlapping.

Leonardo's dedication to portraying the outward manifestations of inner emotions would end up driving not only his art but some of his anatomical studies. He needed to know which nerves emanated from the brain and which from the spinal cord, which muscles they activated, and which facial movements were connected to others.

As Jobs walked the floor of the Personal Computer Festival, he came to the realization that Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop had been right: Personal computers

There can be something he knows absolutely nothing about, and because of his crazy style and utter conviction, he can convince people that he knows what he's talking about

Though human ingenuity may make various inventions," he wrote, "it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, more direct than does Nature; because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

And yet when the cup of power neared his lips, he became strangely hesitant, reluctant, perhaps coy.

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter.

markets rather than merely chasing old ones.

1981 Apple had $334 million in revenue, compared to Microsoft's $15 million.

The Beatles kept their end of the bargain; none of them ever produced any computers. But Apple ended up wandering into the music business. It got sued again in 1991, when

Innovation is driven by people who have both good theories and the opportunity to be part of a group that can implement them. The

the inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved out to Mountain View and, in 1956, started a company to build transistors using silicon rather than the more expensive germanium that was then commonly used. But

Jobs's overwrought reaction was understandable. Sculley had once been a father figure to him. So had Mike Markkula. So had Arthur Rock. That week all three had abandoned him.