My parents, for my new show.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 May 2016 source ↗
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A fixed Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
His letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in the 1997 annual report, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., February 1998 source ↗
My parents, for my new show.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 May 2016 source ↗
So many. I have been very cowardly in the past, and it came across as me not caring, when the opposite was true.
Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 30 December 2023 source ↗
To a resistant materials teacher at secondary school called Mr Noel. He had a comb-over and whenever he turned his back to write on the blackboard, we would roll up bits of paper and launch them at his head. Once, I hit him. I remember him turning around and looking crestfallen.
Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 18 October 2025 source ↗
My younger self: I had no love for her and I was cruel and she never deserved it.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 6 March 2021 source ↗
The asset I most value, aside from health, is interesting, diverse, and long-standing friends.
Recorded His own pledge letter, written on joining the Giving Pledge in 2010, The Giving Pledge, 2010 source ↗
My first mistake, of course, was in buying control of Berkshire. Though I knew its business - textile manufacturing - to be unpromising, I was enticed to buy because the price looked cheap. Stock purchases of that kind had proved reasonably rewarding in my early years, though by the time Berkshire came along in 1965 I was becoming aware that the strategy was not ideal. If you buy a stock at a sufficiently low price, there will usually be some hiccup in the fortunes of the business that gives you a chance to unload at a decent profit, even though the long-term performance of the business may be terrible. I call this the "cigar butt" approach to investing. A cigar butt found on the street that has only one puff left in it may not offer much of a smoke, but the "bargain purchase" will make that puff all profit. Unless you are a liquidator, that kind of approach to buying businesses is foolish.
Recorded Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder letter, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., 2 March 1990 source ↗
Well, I ran out of gas. You know, I got to be what, 93 at that time, or something like that. And it just – same reason I gave up teaching. I teach – I was – I taught every year from when I was 21 till 88 or 89, and there just came a period when your body said different things to you, and you should turn it over to somebody, just like I did at Berkshire.
Recorded Becky Quick, CNBC “Squawk Box”, recorded in Omaha; CNBC's own transcript of its own broadcast, 31 March 2026 source ↗
The strategy we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.
Recorded His letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in the 1993 annual report, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., February 1994 source ↗
In particular, my decision to sell McDonald's was a very big mistake. Overall, you would have been better off last year if I had regularly snuck off to the movies during market hours.
Recorded His letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in the 1998 annual report, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., February 1999 source ↗
And now, you've got nine countries, including, you know, a guy in North Korea. I mean, and there will be, something will happen. And we worried enormously about it when there were two. And we had perfectly, we had really pretty sane leaders in Kennedy and Khrushchev. You know, I mean, you were not dealing with unstable people or anything like that.
Recorded Becky Quick, CNBC “Squawk Box”, recorded in Omaha; CNBC's own transcript of its own broadcast, 31 March 2026 source ↗
Adam Clayton, Adam Peaty, Adele Parks, Adjoa Andoh, Aidan Gillen, Alex Jones
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