Top 56 Quotes & Sayings by Barry Diller

I never thought I was a very good manager.

Ticketmaster does not set prices. Live Nation does not set ticket prices. Artists set ticket prices.

I don't want to set the world up for surprises.

If you're going to sell stock and somebody wants to buy it at a price and that price is not a price you dictate, but demand dictates, sell it to them now.

Twenty years ago, there were dozens and dozens of independent television producers. There are a couple now, at the most. Mark Burnett, Endemol. It's gone. Everybody works for the Man now. And it's natural law, how that happened: Nobody prescribed it, but it's how things worked out and how it has been for decades, period.

I've not conducted my life in the service of smallness.

This is a world in which reasons are made up because reality is too painful.

Aereo is the first potentially transformative technology that has the chance to give people access to broadcast television delivered over the Internet to any device, large or small, they desire. No wires, no new boxes or remotes, portable everywhere there's an Internet connection in the world - truly a revolutionary product.

Since I was in my early twenties, at ABC, I was always only interested in things that were not already being done.

What I've learned over the years is that focus and singular purpose is the best approach for businesses.

Sometimes it seems like there's more footnotes than text. This isn't something we're proud of, and over time we'd like to see our footnotes steadily shrink.

The world is changing. Networks without a specific branding strategy will be killed. I envision a world of highly niched services and tightly run companies without room for all the overhead the established networks carry.

People have paid for content. They always have.

People, me included, have a truly emotional thing about this iPad.

Now along comes the potential creative destruction brought by a different distribution methodology, the Internet.

Urbanspoon is a nice, little application and it's perfect, of course, for CitySearch because of the reviews it contains and the ability for CitySearch to use that content.

The entertainment business hasn't had a new idea in years.

Well, the Internet is this miracle. It is an absolutely extraordinary idea that you can press a send button, and you are publishing to the world.

I still believe in synergy, but I call it natural law.

What's happened to broadcasting is that broadcasting really used to be... it used to have a very clear public service quotient. And it's more or less now. And it's been lost.

I absolutely believe the Internet is passing from its free days into a paid system. Inevitably, I promise you, it will be paid.

Hollywood is a community that's so inbred, it's a wonder the children have any teeth.

I am a contrarian.

The only way anyone's going to succeed is to build the product.

The directories businesses still make nothing but money. They're overleveraged, they're bankrupt entities, but they still are the largest. This is all going to move online over time. Why Citysearch and Service Magic are so important to us, is because nobody has really colonized it yet completely.

If you're going to run a public company, be absolutely certain of what the parameters are, what the clarity is, that you can explain it to yourselves and explain it externally.

There's no way you can predict what is going to happen in six months or two years in most businesses, and certainly not for businesses that are growing at the rate that we have grown.

Napster has pointed the way for a new direction for music distribution, and we believe it will form the basis of important and exciting new business models for the future of the music industry.

I like businesses in transition, first of all. If ever there were a business in transition, it is publishing.

What interests me is starting businesses on our own, finding ideas that we can support, and simply investing in invention.

Broadcasting began, essentially, in the hands of very, very few players - actually two - and when television came along, there were two networks, then three. Rules began to get formulated that essentially protected that concentrated group.

Facebook's the real deal. Nobody can buy Facebook now. Everybody has taken an angle at it. But Facebook may be the place that organizes everybody's personal information. It's got a very good chance of being that.

If we're going to talk about our businesses, we're going to have to talk about them within the constraints of the disclosure rules, without giving guidance, because we're not going to give guidance, because we don't believe that it is a sensible game to play.

Companies like GE and Procter & Gamble have been in business for a long time. Over decades or a century you're bound to figure out a management structure that works.

No one can solve an issue where there is no economic model yet.

I've always said AOL is great opportunity for somebody.

Who ever knows what will happen with the economy, and will it affect the Internet? There's so much pouring into the Internet; I would doubt it, but I'm not the greatest predictor. But more than any media sector, I think the Internet will hold up.

I'm sure there are some commercial applications for Twitter, but they don't really interest me. I mean, 140 characters? I am really not interested in Ashton Kutcher's daily walks. Not for me.

I don't have answers for anybody else. What I know is that internal complexity makes for superficiality. There's never essentially a pure story unless there's a pure product line that has its own shining clarity.

We need an unambiguous rule - a law - that nobody will step between the publisher and the consumer, full stop.

My opinion, young people go to the Internet. To the Internet distribution system right now, you put it up there and it's accessed by the world.

We have a tax code whose complications and levels of unfairness and levels of choosing people to give tax breaks to and choosing people to deny them to is thousands of pages long with endless complications and unbelievable manipulations by everybody.

What we need to do is replace the entire tax code. I do not think it makes sense to say, 'Let's just grab money from, quote, the wealthy'... The issue is the tax code's rotten and we should start truly over with a simple code that is fair and transparent.

The ability for consumers to receive broadcast over the air signal is their right.

I'm just saying if you want to reach large audiences, then rely on professionals, meaning people who are in the industry and are trained for it, rather than just idiot savants.

The business model for content is to be paid for it. You can be paid for it either though advertising or subscriptions or some new invention, but right now what we've got is advertising revenue and subscription revenue as the only way to be paid for content.

You really want to get a headache? Try to understand Internet advertising.

We want to be able to sell you anything, anywhere, any time you want it.

It's not that you don't want to earn as much money as you can - it is your obligation, of course - but companies have obligations beyond that and they certainly have obligations beyond that at certain times, in the times in which they operate. And they also certainly ought to know that meeting and beating expectations is probably yesterday's game and it will be increasingly so, which would be by the way very healthy for companies. Running a company that meets and beats expectations, and that runs their company accordingly, are companies that I would question why anyone would invest in.

The idea of a company that's earning money, not losing money, that's not, let's say 'industrially endangered,' to have just cutbacks so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one's counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level. First of all, it's certainly not necessary. It's doing it at the worst time. It's throwing people out to a larger, what is inevitably a larger unemployment heap for frankly no good reason.

If you have too many epiphanies, you're on some kind of drug.

We're in a world now where it's not enough to be smart. You have to be curious.

All forms of commerce are adversarial.

Put one dumb foot in front of the other and course-correct as you go.

The American public tunes in every night hoping to see two people screwing. Obviously, we can't give them that but let's always keep it in mind.

I'm never absolutely sure of anything, and I don't want to be. You're either right and you'll pull through, or you're not. We're never going to be right about everything, and we've certainly been wrong.