On how Buffett decided to buy shares of bus company Union Street Railway in the mid-1950s:

“I got up at about 4 a.m. and drove to New Bedford. [C.E.O.] Mark Duff was very nice, polite. Just as I was ready to leave, he said, ‘By the way, we’re been thinking of having a return of capital distribution to shareholders.’ That meant they were going to give back the extra money. “And I said, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ And then he said, ‘Yes and there’s a provision you may not be aware of…that you have to do it in multiples of the par value of the stock. The stock had a $25 par value so that meant it would be paying out at least $25 per share.
And I said, ‘Well, that’s a good start.’ Then he said, ‘Bear in mind, we’re thinking of using two units.’ That meant they were going to declare a fifty-dollar dividend on a stock that was selling at thirty-five or forty dollars at that time.”
So if you bought a share you got all your money back right away and then some. And afterward, you still owned the slice of the business represented by your share of stock…I’ll never know whether my trip up there precipitated that [offer] or not.

Okay, give the guy credit. He worked hard when he was young to get the real story from companies in a time when there was no Internet, and not even a CNBC. And he was smart and charming enough to get what he wanted without being a bully.

On how Susie discovered how rich she and Warren were getting:

[Neighbor] Madeline [Sullivan] rushed down to the Buffett apartment and found Susie distraught. She had accidentally thrown a batch of dividend checks that had been sitting on Warren’s desk into the apartment’s incinerator chute, which led straight down to the building’s furnace…Sure enough the incinerator was cold…When they found the checks, Madeline’s eyes grew wide. They were for as much as thousands of dollars, not $25 or $10 as she had assumed.

Lucy!!! What have you done now?!?!

On Buffett’s immaturity:

Despite his brilliance, Warren was still very immature. For Susie, his helplessness at home meant that he was like having a third child to care for…During meals and parties at home, he often fled small talk by leaving the table to go upstairs. But unlike Ben Graham, he was not upstairs reading Proust, he was working. As for Susie, she knew little and cared less about what Warren did. “I used to write security analyst for his job, and people thought he checked burglar alarms.”

Well, maybe if Buffett had been home more, eldest son Howie wouldn’t have been making the family dog Scout jump off the roof and break a leg (seriously—it’s on page 295).

On meeting Charlie Munger, his longtime partner:

Before long the two men were talking simultaneously, yet they seemed to understand each other perfectly.

A soulmate, at last.