I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.

When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.

There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth

Without Steve Jobs, you would have well-designed computers, probably open and not integrated, but they wouldn't have sex appeal, they wouldn't have romance.

So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.