My idea of a good place to shop is Costco - it has these heavily marbled fillet steaks. The idea of eating some wheat thing and washing it down with carrot juice has never appealed to me.

Trying to prioritize among things we're unlikely to do is pretty fruitless.

Wesco had a market capitalization of $40 million when we bought it [in the early 1970s]. It's $2 billion now. It's been a long slog to a perfectly respectable outcome - not as good as Berkshire Hathaway or Microsoft, but there's always someone in life who's done better.

Every business tries to turn this year's success into next year's greater success. It's hard for me to see why Microsoft is sinful to do this. If it's a sin, then I hope all of Berkshire Hathaway's subsidiaries are sinners. Someone whose salary is paid by U.S.taxpayers is happy to dramatically weaken the one place where we're winning big?!

The Berkshire-style investors tend to be less diversified than other people. The academics have done a terrible disservice to intelligent investors by glorifying the idea of diversification. Because I just think the whole concept is literally almost insane. It emphasizes feeling good about not having your investment results depart very much from average investment results. But why would you get on the bandwagon like that if somebody didn't make you with a whip and a gun?

I think gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you're a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but civilized people don't buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.

I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it.