“Jobs also used the meetings to enforce focus. At Robert Friedland's farm, his job had been to prune the apple trees so that they would stay strong, and that became a metaphor for his pruning at Apple. Instead of encouraging each group to let product lines proliferate based on marketing considerations, or permitting a thousand ideas to bloom, Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. " There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him," Cook said. " That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.”

“More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.”

“You can't have a sustainable US economy without a great education system. Teach students to do the job right. You don't have an innovative economy unless you have a great education.”

“When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.”

“I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant.”

“Asked about the fact that Apple's iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, 'It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”

“Jobs had always been an extremely opinionated eater, with a tendency to instantly judge any food as either fantastic or terrible. He could taste two avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible.”

“When the conventional wisdom of physics seemed to conflict with an elegant theory of his, Einstein was inclined to question that wisdom rather than his theory, often to have his stubbornness rewarded.”

“I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful because I didn't have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when i also didn't have to worry about money.' —Steve Jobs”

“I'd been very influenced by what I'd seen in Japan. Part of what I greatly admired there - and part of what we were lacking in our factory - was as sense of teamwork and discipline. If we didn't have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then we weren't going to have the discipline to keep all those machines running.”

“Ever since Apple's first brochure proclaimed "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication," Jobs had aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them. "It takes a lot of hard word," he said, "to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”