• It just goes to show that it pays to move quickly and decisively when the time is right.

• One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper.

• it’s a lot better to side with a winner than a loser.

• MY STYLE of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.

• The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it.

• Location also has a lot to do with fashion. You can take a mediocre location and turn it into something considerably better just by attracting the right people.

• You can have the most wonderful product in the world, but if people don’t know about it, it’s not going to be worth much.

• One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better.

• The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.

• The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.

• But when people treat me badly or unfairly or try to take advantage of me, my general attitude, all my life, has been to fight back very hard.

• There are people—I categorize them as life’s losers—who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others.

• You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.

• The point is that you can dream great dreams, but they’ll never amount to much if you can’t turn them into reality at a reasonable cost.

• As an adolescent I was mostly interested in creating mischief, because for some reason I liked to stir things up, and I liked to test people.

• I understood early on that the whole academic thing was only a preliminary to the main event—which was going to be whatever I did after I graduated from college.

• Robert and I would tag along and spend our time hunting for empty soda bottles, which we’d take to the store for deposit money.

• Perhaps the most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials.

• It didn’t take me long to realize that there was nothing particularly awesome or exceptional about my classmates, and that I could compete with them just fine.

• I can always tell a loser when I see someone with a car for sale that is filthy dirty. It’s so easy to make it look better.

• I learned something from that: it’s not how many hours you put in, it’s what you get done while you’re working.

• You’ve got to understand that we are talking about a short, fat, bald-headed guy with thick glasses and hands like Jell-O, who’d never lifted anything in his life beside a pen, and who had no physical ability whatsoever. What he did have, however, was an incredible mouth.

• But Irving was very much like a lion tamer. You’ve seen these guys, maybe 150 pounds, who walk blithely into a cage where there’s a magnificent 800-pound lion pacing around. If that animal sensed any weakness or any fear, he’d destroy the trainer in a second. But instead the trainer cracks his whip, walks with authority, and, amazingly, the lion listens. Which is exactly what Irving did with this huge guy, except his whip was his mouth.

• You can’t be scared. You do your thing, you hold your ground, you stand up tall, and whatever happens, happens.

• was located on East 54th Street, and its membership included some of the most successful men and the most beautiful women in the world. It was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy seventy-five-year-old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden.

• I met a lot of beautiful young single women, and I went out almost every night. Actually, I never got involved with any of them very seriously. These were beautiful women, but many of them couldn’t carry on a normal conversation. Some were vain, some were crazy, some were wild, and many of them were phonies.

• I’d seen him at parties, and he was a man with impeccable manners, perfect white hair, beautifully tailored suits, and an imperial style.

• good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.

• There is nothing to compare with family if they happen to be competent, because you can trust family in a way you can never trust anyone else.

• A lot of managers focus on maximizing revenue since that’s what gets reported publicly most often. The smarter guys understand that while big revenues are great, the real issue is the spread between the revenues and costs—because that’s your profit.

• I have a very simple rule when it comes to management: hire the best people from your competitors, pay them more than they were earning, and give them bonuses and incentives based on their performance. That’s how you build a first-class operation.

• There are times when you have to be aggressive, but there are also times when your best strategy is to lie back.

• Barron is a member of what I call the Lucky Sperm Club. He was born wealthy and bred to be an aristocrat, and he is one of those guys who never had to prove anything to anyone. He doesn’t try to impress with his style or his clothing or anything else.

• To me, committees are what insecure people create in order to put off making hard decisions.

• Michael Porter,

• McKinsey is probably the best in its business, but I like consultants even less than I like committees.

• When it comes to making a smart decision, the most distinguished planning committee working with the highest-priced consultants doesn’t hold a candle to a group of guys with a reasonable amount of common sense and their own money on the line.

• Leadership is perhaps the key to getting any job done.

• By total coincidence, I walked up to the rink just as the men were beginning to plant the tree. It happened to be one of the ugliest, scrawniest little trees you’re ever likely to see. I could have lived with that. What got me absolutely nuts was the way they were planting the tree. Just the previous day, we’d planted beautiful specimen sod all around the perimeter of the rink. It had rained the night before and the ground under the newly planted grass was soft. What do these men do but drive their tractor right over the new grass, completely trampling it. In a matter of minutes, these six men—most of whom weren’t needed in the first place—managed to totally destroy a beautiful planting job that had taken two days to complete and now would require three months to grow back in.

• I also intended to build much taller buildings than Macri had planned, to take full advantage of the views and also because I believed tall buildings would make the project more majestic and alluring.

• Providing jobs, in my view, is a far more constructive solution to unemployment than creating welfare programs.

• I SAID AT THE START that I do it to do it. But in the end, you’re measured not by how much you undertake but by what you finally accomplish.