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Steve Jobs Quotes: Personal Stuff
I am a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight. [He was joking. Probably.]
I think [calling Silicon Valley workers “nerds” is] an antiquated notion. There were people in the ’60s who were like that and even in the early ’70s, but now they’re not that way. Now they’re the people who would have been poets had they lived in the ’60s. And they’re looking at computers as their medium of expression rather than language, rather than being a mathematician and using mathematics, rather than, you know, writing social theories.
We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back where we started twenty years ago — older, wiser — with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground.
I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much — if at all.
I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.
You just are yourself, and you work with other people. If you’re inspiring to other people, it makes an impression on them. For example, I hear people at Disney talking about what it was like to work with Walt. They loved him. I know that people at Pixar are going to talk about their days with John Lasseter in the same way. Who knows? Maybe someday somebody will feel that way about working with me. I have no idea.
I think it’s quite a natural curiosity for adopted people to want to understand where certain traits come from. But I’m mostly an environmentalist. I think the way you are raised and your values and most of your world view come from the experiences you had as you grew up. But some things aren’t accounted for that way. I think it’s quite natural to have a curiosity about it. [Nature vs. nurture, in regards to his parents]
I used to be way over on the nurture side, but I’ve swung way over to the nature side. And it’s because of [my sister] Mona and having kids. My daughter is 14 months old, and it’s already pretty clear what her personality is. [1997]
