Quotes By Jeff Bezos

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.

You don't want to negotiate the price of simple things you buy every day.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.

I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

Part of company culture is path-dependent - it's the lessons you learn along the way.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

The one thing that offends me the most is when I walk by a bank and see ads trying to convince people to take out second mortgages on their home so they can go on vacation. That's approaching evil.

I don't know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'

But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.

People forget already how much utility they get out of the Internet - how much utility they get out of e-mail, how much utility they get out of even simple things like brochureware online.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

I'm a big fan of all-you-can-eat plans, because they're simpler for customers.

There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don't actually improve their lives.

My view is there's no bad time to innovate.

Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'

For many people, extended reading sessions on an LCD display cause eyestrain.

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about - they weren't putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.