JEFF BEZOS

We expect all our businesses to have a positive impact on our top and bottom lines. Profitability is very important to us or we wouldn't be in this business.

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.

A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.

The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it's so easy to be motivated.

Strip malls are history.

Ebooks had to happen.

My view is there's no bad time to innovate.

I went to Princeton specifically to study physics.

There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.

I don't know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

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'm skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

Real estate is the key cost of physical retailers. That's why there's the old saw: location, location, location.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface.

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television, and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science, engineering, and exploration.

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

The best customer service is if the customer doesn't need to call you, doesn't need to talk to you. It just works.

I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'

But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.

I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it's not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that's not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.