Only a few businesses will succeed by having the lowest price, so most will need a strategy that includes customer services.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

It's fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast, or a bridge player.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count, like customer satisfaction and performance ... you thrive on that.

Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10 percent to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card.

Don't compare yourself with anyone in this world ... if you do so, you are insulting yourself.

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.

Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without talking about the other.

If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions, they will be moved to act.

Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.

Our success has really been based on partnerships from the very beginning.

A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is, and lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you will go out of business.

Business people need to shake off the notion that information is hard to get.

Customers want high quality at low prices and they want it now.

A company's ability to respond to an unplanned event, good or bad, is a prime indicator of its ability to compete.

Reward worthy failure - experimentation.

There was endless action - not just football, but sailboats, tennis and other things: movement. There was endless talk - the ambassador at the head of the table laying out the prevailing wisdom, but everyone else weighing in with their opinions and taking part.

Pocketknives are kind of drifting out of our cultural consciousness, which I think is a terrible thing.

Sometimes directors may not give you words, you know? They may not talk at all! You've just got to use your radar to figure out how you can get to the center and not lose yourself, but still be directed at the same time.

There is abundant testimony that if we choose love rather than self, we gain immeasurably.

No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helps you.

I'm drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don't understand, where there are things you can't access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school.

Performers have the right to say what they want to, and anyone paying money has the right to accept or reject the art and entertainment that's available.

To me, a life that doesn't change things and touch people's lives is pretty meaningless.

The interpretation of facts in a certain way stimulates other scientists' thoughts.

Anything that raises any internal honesty about gay life is inherently suspect.

When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.

Teamwork builds trust and the trust build growth.

Joy is a heart full and a mind purified by gratitude.

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

I know I can get laughs anywhere, in front of any crowd, if I'm given the chance.

I've become a captive of my own ambitions.

I've been working seriously in giving fashion a place that it deserves.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

He was not a runner, my father, but he was quick. I always remember it was very difficult to escape from him when he was angry. If he wanted to beat us he would always catch us. Even me, he could always catch me.

When I start a book, I write a minimum of five pages every day, except weekends. If I'm going on a ski trip, I take my computer with me, get up at six, do my five pages, and then go skiing.

My mind is like a gyre, and odd juxtapositions happen.

The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.

Let's not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.