Michael Lewis Quotes

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.

The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.

As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.

When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.

In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.

A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term.

Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.

One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.

People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.

People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.

The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.

He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

We aren't natural statisticians. What we are is natural storytelling machines. And so what we do after we have the facts in hand is build a story to explain the facts.

The longer-term the option, the sillier the results generated by the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and the greater the opportunity for people who didn't use it.

The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.

I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldn't it be nice if they looked in the mirror?

Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.

He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.

I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.

Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.

Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time.

Looking into it a bit, Jamie found that the model used by Wall Street to price LEAPs, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, made some strange assumptions.

The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons.

The Moulin Rouge is, like the West Village and the Nasdaq, one of those places that people who don't like to take risks come to for the thrill of being on the spot where risks once were taken.

There's something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.

The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.

When something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable.

The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.

In Wall Street now, you have to hide what you're doing. It's more fun when you don't have to do that. But I don't think its sense of purpose has changed at all.

My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.

He's a machine for competitive balance, ... Yes, the money is in New York. Yes, the money is in his hands. But he squanders money. Thank God for it.

In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000.

Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.

The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.

In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.

Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .

Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly.

If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.

That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.

The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.

People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.

If you're the kind of kid who thinks that all that's important in life is making money, Wall Street is probably still the place to go, especially now that Trump's elected.

I was gonna put him on the bus...I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.

I procrastinate to a point where I'm filled with self-loathing and then I start writing. It's usually a state of self-loathing that gets me going.

I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.

We have the Google family calendar. Before a week starts, my wife and I sit down to decide who's driving who to school or when can we go out on a date.

The fuses had been lit and could not be extinguished. All that remained was to observe the speed of the spark, and the size of the explosions.

Hollywood would much prefer the author be dead, so that they can buy the book and do what they want to do with it.