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He was blessed with an unconventional mind, which overcame his conventional middle-class upbringing.

Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Class
Mind
Overcame
Unconventional
Upbringing
Conventional
Blessed
Middle

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My characters are actually usually pretty smart and admirable.
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Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient, Said Palmer. The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.
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Hollywood would much prefer the author be dead, so that they can buy the book and do what they want to do with it.
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In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.
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Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .
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There's something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.
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My judgement is not good when I am on a book tour. I am not thinking about it that much. What happens is I will go back home. I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old and a wife who is now taking care of them who is wondering where her husband is.
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It's such a pain in the ass to write a book, I can't imagine writing one if I'm not interested in the subject.
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A tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.
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They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.
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There has been this - and it's reflected in the broadcasts - this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic.
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We aren't natural statisticians. What we are is natural storytelling machines. And so what we do after we have the facts in hand is build a story to explain the facts.
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Even as late as the summer of 2006, as home prices began to fall, it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them-to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch.
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The longer-term the option, the sillier the results generated by the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and the greater the opportunity for people who didn't use it.
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The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.
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Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.
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As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.
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Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.
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My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.
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The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.
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