Quotes by Michael Lewis

“The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons.”

“I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldnt it be nice if they looked in the mirror?”

“There has been this - and its reflected in the broadcasts - this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic.”

“Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.”

“The Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven. You cant go fire half your scouts here because they are all friends with the local reporters. Your life is going to hell in the papers.”

“Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesnt speak very much for the larger culture.”

“There are enough books in the world. You want to write the ones that are good. The minute you write books because you need the income not because you think you have a good subject, you should just stop. There are sixty thousand books published in this country every year, and most of them are crap.”

“Why pay $20 million to Harrison Ford? I dont even understand that. They think they have to do it... If someone puts a price on himself, that suggests he is irreplaceable, then he better find somewhere else to work.”

“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.”

“The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.”

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours

A lot of what people did and said when they predicted things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things. There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, Its impossible to know for sure.

After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of peoples judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds.

Stories people told themselves were biased by the availability of the material used to construct them...what people remember about the past, [Kahneman and Tversky] suggested, is likely to warp their judgement of the future. We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.

You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once. Thats when you need to stop and check your thinking...Beware of the delirious guy in the emergency unit with the long history of alcoholism, because you will say, Hes just drunk, and youll miss the subdural hematoma.

The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. I always ask them, Who did you miss? he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? If they dont give me a good one, Im like, Fuck em.

Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

People who think they know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports press - no matter how much evidence you present them to the contrary they will continue to think that what they think is right.

“The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.”

“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.”