We wind a simple ring of iron with coils; we establish the connections to the generator, and with wonder and delight we note the effects of strange forces which we bring into play, which allow us to transform, to transmit and direct energy at will.

The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably ‚Doctor Who.‘ What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

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.

We’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.

I think television has had a vast, unbelievable impact on us.

Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

I find it amusing that I’m on the Internet now, because I’ve criticized it, but mainly I’ve criticized it on the basis of, ‚What are you going to do with it?‘

We polled Tesla owners, do you want autopilot disabled or not. Not one person wanted it disabled. That’s pretty telling.

Nature hates calculators.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

Facebook is quite entrenched and has a network effect. It’s hard to break into a network once it’s formed.

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.

As everything becomes digitized, there’s the idea that things that can’t be digitized become more valuable.

You can’t really imagine music without technology.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore.

It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‚Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.‘

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.

The last people with any ideas are young people.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

We want to make it so that anyone, anywhere – a child growing up in rural India who never had a computer – can go to a store, get a phone, get online, and get access to all of the same things that you and I appreciate about the Internet.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

Electronic books are junk.

I love the freedom of movement that my phone gives me. That has definitely transformed my life.

You can’t be in love with a Google search.

I actually don’t read most of the coverage about Facebook. I try to learn from getting input from people who use our services directly more than from pundits.

I’m often accused of being ahead of my time, but it’s simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.

Eventually, all companies are replaced.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

With Virgin, I’ve just loved creating things. And as a private company, I can get away with moving Virgin from records to airlines to train companies to space companies to whatever, without ever having to worry about analysts knocking the value of my stock.

No. I mean those people really did something for designers I don’t think department stores can, could or should do still today. Today the world is different so you have to make it differently. There’s TV. There’s a lot of things.

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It’s a question of how those tools are used by people.

Games is probably the biggest industry today that has gone really social, right. I mean, the incumbent game companies are really being disrupted and are quickly trying to become social. And you have companies like Zynga.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.

I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

Whenever you do something, people try to re-do it and do a better version, especially if they’re in another country.

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance… in every war they kill you in a new way.

I just want to keep pushing the envelope without it feeling forced.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

Connectivity is a human right.

Any version of Windows is going to have lots of great new things that people use and things that are tough.

The Web and new technology offer more opportunities to reach a world market at a lower price. Today, a person can start a business at home and reach the world market.

The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That’s a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.

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

I’m responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

If we’re trying to build a world-class News Feed and a world-class messaging product and a world-class search product and a world-class ad system, and invent virtual reality and build drones, I can’t write every line of code. I can’t write any lines of code.

The truth of Moore’s law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.

Without electricity, the air would rot.

By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.