We bought a doomed textile mill [Berkshire Hathaway] and a California S&L [Savings & Loan; Wesco] just before a calamity. Both were bought at a discount to liquidation value.

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.

Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs.

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.

The big money is not in the buying and selling ... but in the waiting.

Great investing requires a lot of delayed gratification.

When you locate a bargain, you must ask, 'Why me, God? Why am I the only one who could find this bargain?'

Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.

I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don't believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody's that smart.

A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.

She’d never felt more alone, even as hundreds of people walked by. No one recognized her, and she began to treasure her anonymity as a gift.

I like taking a character at the most intense moments of their lives and exploring all that in full and then moving on.

There is no technology today that cannot be defeated by social engineering.

April fool, n. The March fool with another month added to his folly.

I have no doubt that in the future, the laws that criminalize human love and commitment will look the way the apartheid laws do to us now, so obviously wrong

Really I was open-minded about doing anything, but the one thing I didn't want to do was get myself into a corset, because I was worried I'd never get out again.

A woman told me her child was autistic, and I thought she said artistic. So I said, 'Oh great. I'd like to see some of the things he's done.

A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

Good design doesn't cost, but it pays.