Quotes By Jeff Bezos

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

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.

I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.

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.

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

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

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

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.

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

Infrastructure web services had to happen.

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.

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

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

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

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

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.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

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.

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

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

We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business.

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

The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.

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

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