"You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world"
About this Quote
That double register is what makes the line interesting. Bezos presents narrative as a deeply human constant, which is true enough. People do organize experience through story. Brands know this too. Tech executives, especially in Amazon's era of expansion, learned to speak not just about products but about worlds: ecosystems, journeys, customer obsessions. In that context, the quote reads less like a casual tribute to reading and more like a strategic credo. If people want to inhabit worlds, the winning company won't just sell them objects; it will build the environment in which those objects, desires, and stories circulate.
There's also a useful self-positioning here. Bezos casts himself near the author rather than the retailer, as if Amazon were simply the generous steward of imagination. That's the soft power move. It reframes a distribution giant as a cultural custodian. The line works because it taps into a real tenderness about books while quietly folding that tenderness into Amazon's larger myth: not that it dominates the marketplace, but that it serves a timeless human longing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Book |
|---|---|
| Source | "'We Start With the Customer and We Work Backward'". Interview with Daniel Lyons, www.slate.com. December 24, 2009. |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Bezos, Jeff. (2026, March 25). You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-know-we-love-stories-and-we-love-narrative-we-186470/
Chicago Style
Bezos, Jeff. "You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world." FixQuotes. March 25, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-know-we-love-stories-and-we-love-narrative-we-186470/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world." FixQuotes, 25 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-know-we-love-stories-and-we-love-narrative-we-186470/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2026.



