– Warren Buffett, at the Montana Economic Development Summit on Sept. 13

Because the minute you start trading against the customers is the minute you start designing things that aren’t good for the customers. And the minute you start designing things that aren’t good for the customers, you start designing CDOs, subprime mortgage bonds. You start to misallocate capital. You’re trying to misallocate capital.“

– Michael Lewis, from his Bloomberg interview where he discusses his new book, “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” (on my reading list)

Q. And what would you say to business school graduates?

A. It’s a more general lesson, but in the end, success in business comes from the willingness to grind it out. It’s not because of the brilliant idea. It’s because you are willing to work hard. That’s the key to my success.

Q. Tell me about the best bosses you worked for.

A. My boss in the jewelry business was great because he taught me how to sell and how a business reputation was built on trust.

My boss at Apple was a guy named Mike Murray, who was the director of marketing of the Macintosh division. He gave me so much rope that I could hang myself and sometimes I did. After a while, your neck gets stronger and you also learn not to hang yourself.

A few levels above me, I learned from Steve Jobs that people can change the world. Maybe we didn’t get 95 percent market share, but we did make the world a better place. I learned from Steve that some things need to be believed to be seen. These are powerful lessons — very different from saying we just want to eke out an existence and keep our heads down.

Read the entire interview here.

– David Shenk

– Akio Toyoda, President, Toyota Motor Corp., referring to a production philosophy based on continuous improvement and efficiency that once made the company the envy of global manufacturers.

– from the best-selling 2002 book by New York Times war correspondent, Chris Hedges, and opening quote in the critically-acclaimed 2009 film, “The Hurt Locker”

– President Obama, from today’s televised debate with Republicans.

–Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), from “The Shawshank Redemption”

James Cameron’s new film, “Avatar,” opens tomorrow. The production budget was estimated to top $230 million. The New York Times gave it a big thumbs up.

Mr. Cameron lays out the fundamentals of the narrative efficiently, grabbing you at once with one eye-popping detail after another and on occasion almost losing you with some of the comically broad dialogue.

He’s a masterly storyteller…Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in “Avatar” back in the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn’t exist until recently.

Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life (instead of iPhone size), if only because we were children. Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What’s often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn’t changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder.

From The New York Times.