Our premise is there are going to be a lot of winners. It's not winner take all. Other people do not have to lose for us to win.

I'm not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that's going to invert.

I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.

We watch our competitors, learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can.

Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room

If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large.

It's hard to find things that won't sell online.

If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

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.

I think that, ah, I'm a very goofy sort of person in many ways.

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 don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.

It's part of the territory with Internet stocks, that kind of volatility. It can be up 30 percent one month, it can be down 30 percent in a month, and a minute spent thinking about the short-term stock price is a minute wasted.

I'm skeptical that the novel will be "re­invented." If you start thinking about a medical textbook or something, then, yes, I think that's ripe for reinvention. You can imagine animations of a beating heart. But I think the novel will thrive in its current form. That doesn't mean that there won't be new narrative inventions as well. But I don't think they'll displace the novel.

The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.

I'm not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that's going to invert.

I think there are going to be a bunch of tablet-like devices. It's really a different product category.

If we think long term, we can accomplish things that we couldn't otherwise accomplish.

A lot of people – and I’m just not one of them – believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me.

I think if people read more, that is a better world.

I think technology advanced faster than anticipated. In that whirlwind, a lot of companies didn't survive. The reason we have done well is because, even in that whirlwind, we kept heads-down focused on the customers. All the metrics that we can track about customers have improved every year.

Advertising is the price you pay for unremakable thinking.

If you think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they're thinking about how they're going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we're thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.

If you are going to do large-scale invention, you have to be willing to do three things: You must be willing to fail; you have to be willing to think long term; and you have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

When there's uncertainty in the economy, people get very rational about their spending.

Our role is to help people discover music,

Our vision first and foremost is to be the Earth's most customer-centric company and then, within that, to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything and everything that they might want to buy online,

We have had so many discussions with so many different publishers that it isn't practical to keep it under wraps, ... Too many people know about it.

We will continue to invest in systems, people and product expansion, each of which helps us better serve customers, ... For the rest of 1999, we expect to invest more heavily than we have in the past.

This single individual completely changed something. That's the kind of thing people can do anywhere. They can do it in Seattle; they can do it in North Dakota.

If you're not doing something that people will remark on, then it's going to be hard to generate word of mouth.

There are a whole bunch of people who don't like to shop. But there are also people, maybe, who even do like to shop but are very time pressured. And so shopping online can save people time.

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

Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.

People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often

Our premise is there are going to be a lot of winners. It's not winner take all. Other people do not have to lose for us to win.

I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.

It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.

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.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people, But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavours that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

A lot of people – and I’m just not one of them – believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you’re planning for that in a way that’s going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me.

There's so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.

There are multiple ways to be externally focused that are very successful. You can be customer-focused or competitor-focused. Some people are internally focused, and if they reach critical mass, they can tip the whole company.

Our point of view is we will sell more if we help people make purchasing decisions.

Our biggest cost is not power, or servers, or people. It's lack of utilization. It dominates all other costs.