Quotes from Michael Lewis

Amos liked to say that if you are asked to do anything—go to a party, give a speech, lift a finger—you should never answer right away, even if you are sure that you want to do it. Wait a day, Amos said, and you'll be amazed how many of those invitations you would have accepted yesterday you'll refuse after you have had a day to think it over.

York Giants' linebacker has been so completel

line. Giants coach Tom Coughlin suspected another culprit. He stayed up that night reviewing game tape, and finally took out a stopwatch

Why was it still possible, in 2006, to say something original and important about the events of 1918? Why had it taken nearly a century to see a simple truth about the single most deadly pandemic in human history? Only after three amateur historians studied the various interventions, and the various death tolls in individual American cities, did the importance of timing became obvious.

Myers-Briggs–type personality test.

I was in a state of perpetual disbelief. I would have thought that someone would have recognized what was coming before June 2007. If it really took that June remit data to cause a sudden realization, well, it makes me wonder what a 'Wall Street analyst' really does all day." By

season, 1984, he did. The feelings of those assigned to prevent Taylor from hurting quarterbacks were trivial compared to those of the quarterbacks he wanted to hurt. In Taylor's first season

People did not choose between things. They chose between descriptions of things.

Several days later he'd worked his way back to the late 1800s. The entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandals, it now seemed to him, linked together tail to trunk like circus elephants.

The specific thing that blew my mind was using multiple semi-effective strategies together. There was no silver bullet. Right then I say, 'This is important. This has legs. It's not my job. I don't give a shit. I'm working on this.

Passing one tableau of blood and guts and moving on to the next, I caught myself glancing over my shoulder to make sure some Viking wasn't following me with a battle-ax. The effect was so disorienting that when I reached the end and found a Japanese woman immobile and reading on a bench, I had to poke her on the shoulder to make sure she was real.

The game of football evolved and here was one cause of its evolution, a new kind of athlete doing a new kind o

Never was a man's love of risk so beautifully amplified by his environment as Clark's was in Silicon Valley.

To fire a competent civil servant is a pain in the ass. To fire a competent presidential appointee is as easy as tweeting.

His reaction is a mystery until ABC Sports clarifies the event, by replaying it over and again, in slow motion. "Again, we'll look at it with

The next game we have is against the Vikings on Monday Night Football. Tommy Kramer is the quarterback. They don't employ the strategy. He knocks Kramer out of the game, causes two fumbles and recovers one of them. I'm leaving the field, walking down the tunnel towards the locker room for the pres

Despite Tokyo's astronomical land prices, anyone within earshot of real power commands a room the size of a basketball court in which to host those famous consensus-building sessions. If you want to measure a Japanese man's clout, get him to show you his conference room.

Who cares what other people think?" says Alexander. "It's not their team.")

Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.

Icelanders are among the most inbred human beings on earth—geneticists often use them for research.

People like Justin Frankel and Daniel Sheldon linger on the fringe until they dream up something that has great commercial potential. Then some big company swoops in and buys them, or they give birth to the big company themselves.

These days the investment bankers came to Silicon Valley.

In his own job interview, Morey was reassured by Alexander's social fearlessness, and the spirit in which he operated. "He asked me, 'What religion are you?' I remember thinking, I don't think you're supposed to ask me that. I answered it vaguely, and I think I was saying my family were Episcopalians and Lutherans when he stops me and says, 'Just tell me you don't believe any of that shit.

You invite a few players in to start a game of Texas Hold'em by telling them that the deck doesn't have any jacks or queens in it and that you won't tell the other people who come to play with them. How do you get people into the casino? You pay the brokers to bring them there.