People who get trapped in the tunnel vision of making money think that is all there is to life.
Discourse has ended in America. It's all just shouting and ranting and demonization. Do you know how the rest of the world laughs at you guys? Have you got any idea? They're just rocking with laughter night and day.
What is negotiation but the accumulation of small lies leading to advantage?
For me, temptation is life and I have a gargantuan appetite for everything.
You can collect all the plastic bottle caps you want as long as you give me the money so we can get off this death trap, find somewhere else and have tremendous fun screwing that up as well.
People really do not have time to read all the newspapers in the world and all the sites that we now commonly use on the web. There is no possibility of keeping up.
I think having a great idea is vastly overrated. I know it sounds kind of crazy and counterintuitive. I don't think it matters what the idea is, almost. You need great execution.
You'll never get rich by working for your boss.
Human beings are definitely changing the planet, but how much impact they are having on climate, I don't know and I don't care.
False praise is worse than no praise.
I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'
America is an empire. I hope you know that now. All empires, by definition, are bumbling, shambolic, bullying, bureaucratic affairs, as certain of the rightness of their cause in infancy, as they are corrupted by power in their dotage.
I cannot abide being bored.
I have one talent, and that's figuring out what people want about two minutes before they know it themselves.
You cannot be seeking yourself when you're making money.
I loathe and detest movies and television and don't watch any. I do not have the time.
I've been busy for years, buying land, often under pseudonyms, and planting trees on it. All the money is going into it when I die - and in the end I'd like to think that it will be 20 to 30,000 acres.
When you're writing, you're in a totally different zone... I can start a difficult poem and look up at the clock and see to my astonishment that three hours have passed.
'Great Expectations' has been described as 'Dickens's harshest indictment of society.' Which it is. After all, it's about money. About not having enough money; about the fever of the getting of money; about having too much money; about the taint of money.
I never sue journalists. I employ journalists. I employ too many of them. I don't sue journalists.
When I see something that's wrong, I just speak and act first and I'll take the consequences later.
I'm so suspicious of our own understanding of the past. I just think that your mind plays absolute tricks on you and fools you every minute of every day. And so when you're talking about the past, you're talking about something that never happened. At least it didn't happen the way you think it happened.
I've always noted with some awe the reading habits of the Australian public. Australians read more newspapers and magazines per head of population than almost any other country in the world.
Everything I publish is for my readers.
I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.
This modern mania for interfering in other's lives, usually under the guise of health and safety concerns, is highly irritating and counterproductive. Down with the nanny state.
Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.
The reason I don't carry a mobile phone is I don't want people to know where I am!
With the greatest of respect, I have watched Apple from the day it started. I was publishing magazines about the Apple II before most people had ever heard what a personal computer was.
I couldn't care less what anyone's 'perception' of me is. I'm too long in the tooth to care.
Native trees are so important to our ecosystem.
You cannot properly bring up children when you are 69 or 70 and they are 12 and at the height of their madness. You can physically do it, but I don't think it's morally justified.
Publishing magazines for yourself is not good business, man.
There is never a time in a company's history when cost control can be relegated to the back burner, but for a startup company, keeping costs low is a vital necessity.
Unless you are completely retired, earning money is the best form of wealth preservation.
The climate has been changing since there was a climate.
I should have liked to get married, but over many decades I have lived essentially alone. I go to sleep when I'm tired, get up when I wake up, have my food prepared when I'm hungry. I can't bear the thought that I'd have to coincide, make an effort.
I only buy a computer when it's two years old, after the glitches have been worked out.
The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.
Posthumous reputations have little to do with real lives.
The richer you are and the more financial advisers you employ, the less likelihood there is that you can ever discover what you are really worth.
Overhead will eat you alive if not constantly viewed as a parasite to be exterminated. Never mind the bleating of those you employ. Hold out until mutiny is imminent before employing even a single additional member of staff. More startups are wrecked by overstaffing than by any other cause, bar failure to monitor cash flow.
Good ideas are like Nike sports shoes. They may facilitate success for an athlete who possesses them, but on their own they are nothing but an overpriced pair of sneakers. Sports shoes don't win races. Athletes do.
It's kind of a crazy thing to decide that you're going to be worth tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars and set out to do that. It doesn't suit everybody.
People think I'm just an old Luddite, but that's untrue. I buy every new gizmo as it comes out, play with it until I understand how it works, and then give it away.
It's a long, slow sunset for ink-on-paper magazines, but sunsets can produce vast sums of money.
In the end, the railroads made America and nanotech will make the 21st century, and that is the end of the story. The beginning of the story and the end of the story.
The beginnings of a forest is one of the ugliest things on the planet. It's bleak and your neighbours hate you.
