Quotes from Walter Isaacson

school, she refused to sign the adoption papers. The standoff lasted weeks, even after the baby had settled into the

An invention, especially one as complex as the computer, usually comes not from an individual brainstorm but from a collaboratively woven tapestry of creativity.

summer of 1989, he asked her to marry him. She couldn't do it. It would drive her crazy, she told friends. She had grown up in a volatile household, and her relationship with Jobs bore too many similarities to that environment. They were opposites who attracted

Visions without execution are hallucinations.31

Apple and went on to be a partner in the venture firm Sequoia Capital with Don Valentine) repudiated it by complaining that his reporting had been "siphoned, filtered, and poisoned with gossipy benzene by an editor in New York whose regular task was to chronicle the wayward world of rock-and-roll music.

a table and diagram showing exactly how the algorithm would be fed into the computer, step by step, including two recursive loops. It was a numbered list of coding instructions that included destination registers, operations, and commentary—something that would be familiar to any C++ coder today.

Plato inscribed over the door of his Academy: "Let no one who is not a mathematician read my work.

What drives people to kill and maim each other so savagely?" Einstein asked. "I think it is the sexual character of the male that leads to such wild explosions.

In 2001 Jobs had a vision: Your personal computer would serve as a "digital hub" for a variety of lifestyle devices, such as music players, video recorders, phones, and tablets. This played to Apple's strength of creating end-to-end products that were simple to use. The company was thus transformed from a high-end niche computer company to the most valuable technology company in the world.

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

In narrative paintings you should closely intermingle direct opposites, because they offer a great contrast to each other, especially when they are adjacent. Thus, have the ugly one next to the beautiful, the large next to the small, the old next to the young.

I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

Indeed Sony provided a clear counterexample to Apple. It had a consumer electronics division that made sleek products and a music division with beloved artists (including Bob Dylan). But because each division tried to protect its own interests, the company as a whole never got its act together to produce an end-to-end service.

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful.

So Jobs and his team became excited about the prospect of building a phone that they would want to use. "That's the best motivator of all," Jobs later said.

When you have feelings," he said, "like sadness or anger about your cancer or your plight, to mask them is to lead an artificial life.

Ive was a fan of the German industrial designer Dieter Rams, who worked for the electronics firm Braun. Rams preached the gospel of "Less but better," Weniger aber besser, and likewise Jobs and Ive wrestled with each new design to see how much they could simplify it.

similar attention on the title bars atop windows and documents. He had Atkinson and Kare do them over and over again as he agonized over their look. He did not like the ones on the Lisa because they were too black and harsh. He

He had launched his "Think Different" campaign, featuring iconic photos of some of the same people we were considering, and he found the endeavor of assessing historic influence fascinating.

I studied the relationship of their motions to their emotions. When I saw the hint of a smile come across someone's lips, I tried to fathom her inner mysteries.

Innovation is most vibrant in the realms where open-source systems compete with proprietary ones. Sometimes

For the rest of his career, Jobs would understand the needs and desires of customers better than any other business leader, he would focus on a handful of core products, and he would care, sometimes obsessively, about marketing and image and even the details of packaging.

I didn't want anyone to know I had parents. I wanted to be like an orphan who had bummed around the country on trains and just arrived out of nowhere, with no roots, no connections, no background.

I ended up having more than forty interviews and conversations with him.