«Leadership is a word and a concept that has been more argued than almost any other I know. I am not one of the desk-pounding types that likes to stick out his jaw and look like he is bossing the show. I would far rather get behind and, recognizing the frailties and the requirements of human nature, would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him, he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.»

«People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.»

«Sometimes I want to clean up my desk and go out and say, respect me, I'm a respectable grown-up, and other times I just want to jump into a paper bag and shake and bake myself to death»

«My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.»

«When a load of bricks, dumped on a corner lot, can arrange themselves into a house; when a handful of springs and screws and wheels, emptied on a desk, can gather themselves into a watch, then and not until then will it seem sensible, to some of us at least, to believe that all these thousands or millions of worlds could have been created, balanced and set to revolving in their separate orbits -- all without any directing intelligence at all.»

«When I am me, I can see me in my space. My desk faces the window and an ocean. The flower on my desk gives off a wonderful aroma. The refrigerator has something in it I feel good about eating. When I am me, I can see me in my day. I am writing. I am talking from a heart of love. I am reviewing my notes, or editing, or walking, or something outside. I am connecting with nature and people.»

«People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.»

«Microsoft was founded with a vision of a computer on every desk, and in every home. We've never wavered from that vision.»

«So the vision of Microsoft is pretty simple. It changed a couple years ago. For the first 25 years of the company, it was a personal computer on every desk and in every home. And it was a very good vision; very rare for a company to be able to stick with something like that for 25 years. The reason we changed it was simply that it became acceptable. . . . And so as we stepped back and looked at what we were trying to do with the programming model, turning the Internet into the fabric for distributed computing, getting your information to replicate in a very invisible way so that it was available to you everywhere, thinking of this programming model spanning all the different devices, we changed to the mission statement we have now, which is empowering people through great software anytime, any place and on any device.»

«Look, ask me what paper came to my desk last week and I couldn't tell you»