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Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .

Michael Lewis

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Michael Lewis
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: October 15
Author
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Michael M. Lewis
Folly
Obvious
Financial
Rich
Everything
Would
Histories
Retrospect
Authors

More quotes by Michael Lewis

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All that was clear that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise.
Michael Lewis
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I'd stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me me as totally preposterous-which is one reason the money was so easy to walk away from.
Michael Lewis
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Girls tend to attribute their failures to factors such as lack of ability, while boys tend to attribute failure to specific factors, including teachers' attitudes. Moreover, girls avoid situations in which failure is likely, whereas boys approach such situations as a challenge, indicating that failure differentially affects self-esteem.
Michael Lewis
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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.
Michael Lewis
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You can anchor the mind into answering a question a certain way by giving them a totally unrelated piece of information dropped before.
Michael Lewis
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I was gonna put him on the bus...I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.
Michael Lewis
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My characters are actually usually pretty smart and admirable.
Michael Lewis
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Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it.
Michael Lewis
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I confess some part of me thought, If only I'd stuck around, this is the sort of catastrophe I might have created.
Michael Lewis
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In Wall Street now, you have to hide what you're doing. It's more fun when you don't have to do that. But I don't think its sense of purpose has changed at all.
Michael Lewis
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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.
Michael Lewis
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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.
Michael Lewis
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The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.
Michael Lewis
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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.
Michael Lewis
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I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.
Michael Lewis
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In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.
Michael Lewis
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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.
Michael Lewis
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Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.
Michael Lewis
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When an American declares bankruptcy, when he hits bottom, he can reinvent himself. There's a story he can tell. We tolerate reinvention. We encourage reinvention. That's what this country has that Europe does not. It's not just a crisis it's an opportunity.
Michael Lewis
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As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.
Michael Lewis