"People think I'm a gambler. I've never gambled in my life. To me, a gambler is someone who plays slot machines. I prefer to own slot machines. It's a very good business being the house."

"One of the problems when you become successful is that jealousy and envy inevitably follow. There are people—I categorize them as life's losers—who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others. As far as I'm concerned, if they had any real ability they wouldn't be fighting me, they'd be doing something constructive themselves."

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

"My philosophy is always to hire the best from the best."

"Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you're generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make."

"I like thinking big. I always have. To me it's very simple: if you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big. Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage."

"My experience is that if you're fighting for something you believe in—even if it means alienating some people along the way—things usually work out for the best in the end."

"In the end, you're measured not by how much you undertake but by what you finally accomplish."

"What I admire most are people who put themselves directly on the line."

"The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you're dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can't do without. Unfortunately, that isn't always the case, which is why leverage often requires imagination, and salesmanship."

"I wasn't satisfied just to earn a good living. I was looking to make a statement."

"I don't do it for the money. I've got enough, much more than I'll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks."

"I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present."

"Sometimes it pays to be a little wild."

"Deal-making is an ability you're born with. It's in the genes."

"The point is that you can't be too greedy."

"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. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion."

"Get in, get it done, get it done right, and get out."

"My own mother was a housewife all her life. And yet it's turned out that I've hired a lot of women for top jobs, and they've been among my best people. Often, in fact, they are far more effective than the men around them."

"This boastful, boyishly disarming, thoroughly engaging personal history offers an inside look at aspects of financing, development and construction in big-time New York real estate."

"In my life, there are two things I've found I'm very good at: overcoming obstacles and motivating good people to do their best work."

"Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game."

"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."

"I'm a great believer in asking everyone for an opinion before I make a decision. ... I ask and I ask and I ask, until I begin to get a gut feeling about something. And that's when I make a decision. I have learned much more from conducting my own random surveys than I could ever have learned from the greatest of consulting firms."

"Even as I tried to convince myself, I realized what I have often had to accept since, that if you have to try and persuade yourself of something, you are probably already very much inclined to doubt or distrust it."

"I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the devising of ever-crueler punishments for deviance, all invoked as if this very fanaticism did not give its whole game away. Repression is the problem in the first place."

"I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned."

"If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of history, then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one."

"The occasion was to become a famous one, since it was the very time when the habitual and professional liar Clinton later claimed that he “didn’t inhale.” There’s no mystery about this, any more than there ever was about his later falsifications. He has always been allergic to smoke and he preferred, like many another marijuana enthusiast, to take his dope in the form of large handfuls of cookies and brownies."

"After all, to be a mere “Sixties” person, all you needed was to have been born in the right year, and to be available for what I once heard called “the most contemptible solidarity of all: the generational.”"

"Once you have been told that you can’t leave a place, its attractions may be many but its charm will instantly be void."

"The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is “systematic.” The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong."

"It was indeed Auden – who had been a master at such a school as well as having been a pupil at one – who had said that the experience had given him an instinctive understanding of what it would be like to live under fascism. (He had also said, when told by the headmaster that only “the cream” attended the school: “yes I know what you mean – thick and rich.”)"

"But a protestation of my innocence would have been, as in any inquisition, an additional proof of guilt."

"Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of “the flock.”"

"Of course I now recognize this as the working model, drawn from monotheistic religion, where love is compulsory and must be offered to a higher being one must necessarily also fear. This moral blackmail is based on a quintessential servility. The fact that the headmaster held the prayerbook and the Bible during the services also drove home to me the obvious fact that religion is an excellent reinforcement of shaky temporal authority."

"So there it was: Cuban Socialism was too much like a boarding school in one way and too much like a church in another."

"The best of that scene was probably over, because by the time you have heard of such a “scene” it has almost invariably moved on or decayed."

"Haight-Ashbury and the flower-power district were getting truly tawdry but this was also in obedience to the iron law which states that once you have to call something a “historic district” or a “popular quarter” then, just like the Wild West, it loses whatever character gave it the definition in the first place."

"Amid all this chaos on the various frontiers what I increasingly thought was: thank whatever powers there may be for the power of the United States of America. Without that reserve strength, the sheer mass of its arsenal in combination with the innovative maneuvers of its special forces, the tyrants and riffraff of the world would possess an undeserved sense of impunity. As it was, the Taliban were soon in full flight from the celebrating people they had for so long oppressed, and Al Quaeda was being taught to take heavy casualties as well as inflict them. I was not against this."

"“Sometimes the wrong people can have the right line.” I thought then that he had said more than he intended, and myself experienced the remark as a sort of emancipation from the worry, which did still occasionally nag at me, that by taking up some out-of-line position I would find myself “in bed with,” as the saying went, unsavory elements. It’s good to throw off this sort of moral blackmail and mind-forged manacle as early in life as one can."

"Even at the time, as I left the party, I knew I had met someone rather impressive. And the worst of “Thatcherism,” as I was beginning by degrees to discover, was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right."

"As time had elapsed, I had gradually been made aware that there was a deep division between Noam and myself. Highly critical as we both were of American foreign policy, the difference came down to this. Regarding almost everything since Columbus as having been one continuous succession of genocides and land-thefts, he did not really believe that the United States of America was a good idea to begin with. Whereas I had slowly come to appreciate that it most certainly was, and was beginning to feel less and less shy about saying so. We commenced a duel, conducted largely in cyberspace, in which I began by pointing out the difference between unmanned cruise missiles on the one hand and crowded civilian airliners rammed into heavily populated buildings on the other. We more or less went on from there."

"Today I want to puke when I hear the word “radical” applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world."

"I saw the awakening of a new respect for the almost-eclipsed figure of the American proletarian, who was busting his sinews in the rubble and carnage of downtown while the more refined elements wrung their hands. What an opportunity for the Left to miss, there, and what an overbred and gutless Left it had proved to be."

"Death has this much to be said for it: You don’t have to get out of bed for it. Wherever you happen to be They bring it to you – free."

"“The one unforgivable sin,” she used to say, “is to be boring.”"

"I of course do not believe that it is Allah who determines these things. (Salman Rushdie, commenting on my book god Is Not Great, remarked rather mordantly that the chief problem with its title was a lack of economy: that it was in other words exactly one word too long.)"

"At a time when smallpox vaccination was being denounced by leading men of god like Dr. Timothy Dwight of Yale as an interference with god’s design, Jefferson helped devise a method of keeping Jenner’s life-saving physic cool for conveyance over long distances, taught Lewis and Clark to administer it during their long trek across the interior, and saw to it that all his slaves were inoculated against the scourge."