I think I am very goal oriented. I'd like to win the America's cup. I'd like Oracle to be the No 1 software company in the world. I still think it is possible to beat Microsoft.

When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.

You cannot innovate by copying.

... Don't mistake any of this for altruism...Fear and greed just doesn't work. If you want to be successful, quality and service just works better.

Five years from now, I don't know how I'll think.

It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good."

You realize that life is short and fragile; and when you are facing walls of water, you understand your own mortality can change and how quickly things could change.