People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things.

You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest.

The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do – keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

I don’t think that my role in life is to run big organizations and do incremental improvements.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.

The people who go to see our movies are trusting us with something very important – their time and their imagination. So in order to respect that trust, we have to keep changing; we have to challenge ourselves and try to surprise our audiences with something new every time.

Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.

You can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big thing is. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’

My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can’t tell you about the next breakthrough that’s going to happen next year that’s going the change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow away – you have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough.

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations.

You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog shit for frosting.

We want to stand at the intersection of computers and humanism.

Besides Dylan, I was interested in Eastern mysticism, which hit the shores at about the same time.

Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan’s poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff.

I started to listen to music a whole lot and I started to read more outside of just science and technology, Shakespeare, Plato. I loved ‘King Lear’.

Learning to program teaches you how to think. Computer science is a liberal art.

On why he made everybody sign the Mac cases: Because the people that worked on it consider themselves and I certainly consider them artists. These are the people that under different circumstances would be painters and poets but because of that time that we live in this new medium has appeared in which to express oneself to one’s fellow species and that’s a medium of computing.

How do you know the direction to head with products? It boils down to taste. Emerge yourself with the best ideas from the humanities. And integrate them. Pull interests from diverse areas.

A lot of people that would have been artists and scientists have gone into this field to express their feeling and so it seemed like the right thing to do.

The key thing that comes true is that they had a variety of experiences which they could draw upon, in order to try to solve a problem or to attack a particular dilemma in a kind of unique way.

Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist.

Well, I was thrown out of school a few times.

Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.

The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person. 

I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done

In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment – however you define it

You have to believe that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing.

Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.

I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out ok.

I do not adopt softness towards others because I want to make them better.

Once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

That’s why we started Apple, we said you know, we have absolutely nothing to lose. I was 20 years old at the time, Woz was 24-25, so we have nothing to lose. We have no families, no children, no houses. Woz had an old car. I had a Volkswagen van, I mean, all we were going to lose is our cars and the shirts off our back.

I always advise people – Don’t wait! Do something when you are young, when you have nothing to lose, and keep that in mind.

I always advise people – Don’t wait! Do something when you are young, when you have nothing to lose, and keep that in mind.

I don’t care about being right. I care about success and doing the right thing.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity

The most precious thing that we all have with us is time

We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.

On the blue box: That was what we learned: was that us, too, we didn’t know much. We could build a little thing that could control a giant thing and that was an incredible lesson.

Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart.

Don’t take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint

We were really working fourteen-to-eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. For like, two years, three years. That was our life. But we loved it, we were young, and we could do it.

You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.