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Who really said it

Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest

Attributed to Warren Buffett Born 1930 · American investor; chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
Attributed In copyright

Credibly and very widely credited to Buffett, and entirely in character — but the wording reaches us through a single listener. Todd Combs recalled it from a Columbia Business School investing class, and Quote Investigator ↗ finds its earliest printing in a 2013 Omaha World-Herald profile, with no contemporaneous transcript or recording behind it.

Last verified 4 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest” attributed to Warren Buffett, recalled by Todd Combs from a Columbia Business School class and first printed in the Omaha World-Herald, 28 April 2013. No contemporaneous record exists. Via Quotle.info

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Omaha World-Herald (Steve Jordon), for the 2013 article in which the wording first appeared). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Warren Buffett — American investor; chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. Theme: "Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the wording actually comes from

Earliest documented printing
Investors earn handsome paychecks by handling Buffett’s business
Publication
Omaha World-Herald, 28 April 2013, by Steve Jordon
Occasion recalled
An investing class at Columbia Business School, which Todd Combs attended as an MBA student; Quote Investigator dates the remark circa 2002
Basis
One listener’s recollection, published years afterwards — no transcript, recording or contemporaneous note is known

“Read 500 pages like this every day,” said Buffett, or words to that effect. “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.” Recollection, not transcript

Note the four words inside the passage that almost every retelling drops: or words to that effect. That hedge is the newspaper’s own — the Omaha World-Herald declining to vouch for the exact sentence, because it was being reconstructed from memory by a student who heard it roughly a decade earlier. It is the strongest caveat in the whole record, and it comes from the source rather than from us.

Quote Investigator: the “500 pages” investigation

How a classroom aside became an internet commandment

  • Circa 2002 — a classroom, no recorder running. Todd Combs, who took his MBA at Columbia Business School in 2002 (Wikipedia ↗), hears Buffett answer a student question about preparing for an investing career. Nothing is published at the time.
  • 2010 — the first printed page-count is weekly, and it is about Combs. When the Wall Street Journal reports Buffett tapping Combs, it describes Combs as reading 500 pages a week; Quote Investigator ↗ notes this citation does not contain the famous sentence at all.
  • 28 April 2013 — the sentence appears in print. Steve Jordon’s Omaha World-Herald profile of Berkshire’s investment managers carries Combs’s recollection; QI identifies this as the first citation printing the exact words ↗.
  • Afterwards — the “a day” version takes over. Business media recycle it relentlessly, while at least one investing columnist argues Buffett actually said 500 pages a week (GuruFocus via Yahoo Finance ↗).
In copyright

There is no pre-1931 work here to fall back on: the remark was spoken circa 2002 and first fixed in print in a 2013 newspaper article, so both the article and the reported wording are modern, in-copyright material. Quotle.info reproduces the sentence as short quotation for identification and fact-checking, not as a public-domain text.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What people get wrong about this one

Nobody serious claims a different author — the problem is precision. The line is quoted as though someone wrote it down at the time, and the page count itself is contested.

“500 pages a day” vs “500 pages a week” Contested

Mind where the weekly number comes from. The 2010 Wall Street Journal figure recorded by Quote Investigator ↗ is Chuck Davis of Stone Point describing Combs’s own reading pace — “reads 500 pages a week” — not Buffett’s advice; but it is where the confusion starts. The real dispute comes later: a 2018 GuruFocus column by Adam Parris argues outright that Buffett said 500 pages a week ↗, and Farnam Street’s much-shared write-up of the Combs story renders the advice as weekly ↗.

A transcript that does not exist No primary source

There is no known recording, transcript or contemporaneous note of the class. QI ↗ calls the evidence substantive but flags the significant delay before publication and leaves open that an earlier citation may be found.

Buffett’s sourced quotations Absent

The line does not appear on Wikiquote’s Warren Buffett page ↗, whose sourced sections draw mainly on his shareholder letters and meeting remarks.

Buffett’s own page count Conflated

The remark is advice Buffett is remembered giving to students, but it circulates as a statistic about Buffett’s personal habits. The 600-to-1,000-pages-a-day figure that often travels with it belongs to Combs, not Buffett, in the Omaha World-Herald account (quoted here ↗).

Best available reading: Buffett very likely said something close to this in a Columbia classroom, but every printed version descends from one student’s memory published in 2013 — so quote it as attributed, and do not present the daily page count as settled fact (Quote Investigator ↗).

Context

Why this line travels so well

Compounding is Buffett’s native metaphor — it is the mechanism his entire career is built on — so hearing him apply it to reading feels less like a quotation and more like a signature. That is exactly what makes it hard to police: the sentence is so characteristic that few people who repeat it ever think to ask where it was written down.

The answer is that it was not written down, at least not for years. It surfaced in an Omaha World-Herald profile of the two investment managers Buffett had recruited, where Todd Combs described taking the advice literally and building a reading habit around it. The anecdote is the reason we have the sentence at all — and it is also the reason the wording cannot be checked against anything.

It sounds exactly like Buffett. That is precisely why it needs a source rather than a vibe.

Read the full story

The day-versus-week wobble is worth sitting with — but it is not Quote Investigator’s wobble. QI’s own conclusion is that there is substantive evidence Buffett made a remark about reading 500 pages a day, resting on Combs’s testimony, while flagging the eleven years between the class and the printing. The weekly figure QI cites is Chuck Davis of Stone Point describing Combs’s reading pace in the 2010 Wall Street Journal, not a rival version of Buffett’s line; the day-versus-week argument is made later, by GuruFocus and Farnam Street, and QI never adjudicates it.

None of this makes the advice wrong. It makes the quotation marks a claim — and a claim resting on one memory, published long after the fact, is an attribution rather than a verified text.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Knowledge Growth Work

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: Read 500 Pages Like This Every Dayquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation: traces the wording to Todd Combs’s testimony, names the 2013 Omaha World-Herald article as the first citation printing the exact words, and notes the 2010 WSJ’s “500 pages a week.”
Wikiquote: Warren Buffetten.wikiquote.org

Buffett’s sourced quotations, shareholder letters and disputed/misattributed sections — useful precisely because this line is not among them.
Wikipedia: Warren Buffetten.wikipedia.org

Biography and current role: born 30 August 1930; Greg Abel became president and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway on 1 January 2026, with Buffett remaining chairman.
Wikipedia: Todd Combsen.wikipedia.org

The listener the quotation depends on: born 1971, Columbia Business School MBA in 2002, tapped by Buffett in October 2010, later CEO of GEICO.
Farnam Street: The Buffett Formulafs.blog

A widely shared retelling that credits the Combs anecdote to the Omaha World-Herald — and renders Buffett’s advice as 500 pages weekly.
GuruFocus: the 500-pages-per-week casefinance.yahoo.com

Adam Parris (GuruFocus, January 2018) argues the popular daily version is a misquote and that Buffett told the Columbia class he read 500 pages a week.

The man it is credited to

Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett

Born 1930 · American investor; chairman of Berkshire Hathaway

Warren Buffett, born 30 August 1930, built Berkshire Hathaway from a failing textile firm into one of the world’s largest conglomerates and became the most quoted investor alive. His public voice is unusually well documented — decades of annual shareholder letters and marathon meeting Q&As — which is part of why an undocumented Buffett line stands out. He handed the chief executive role to Greg Abel on 1 January 2026 and remained chairman.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented printing

Steve Jordon, “Investors Earn Handsome Paychecks by Handling Buffett’s Business,” Omaha World-Herald, April 28, 2013 — identified by Quote Investigator as the first citation printing this wording, on the testimony of Todd Combs. See Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Read 500 Pages Like This Every Day. That’s How Knowledge Works. It Builds Up, Like Compound Interest,” October 20, 2018.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/read-500-pages-like-this-every-day-thats-how-knowledge/

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