My highlights from the book:

1. Every time we had a conversation he [Walter Chrysler] shed tears yet always what started them was thinking of the past when he was a poor young man. At first, I mistakenly supposed that he was feeling sorry for himself. Finally, I came to realize what it was that so deeply moved him when he contemplated his inauspicious start, including those years of riding freight trains from town to town when he was hunting a chance to work and gain more experience. It was gratitude of course; gratitude to everything American that made possible his great success. He told his story in the hope it might inspire other lonely boys roving in the land to keep on trying.

2. In many of the visions of my father that recur to me, there is a paintbrush in his hand, or a hammer or a saw. Always he was trying to make life better for his family. 

3. I confess I raised my share of hell. 

4. I certainly aimed to grow up tough. 

5. I offered myself as a delivery boy and was hired at ten dollars a month. I went to work at six o’ clock in the morning and was through by 10:30 at night. 

6. I did not like the thought of college. 

7. I had a stubborn streak in me. 

8. I loved to see engines with their mysteries exposed. I envied the mechanics who understood their inner workings. 

9. I was a cocky youngster and full of confidence, but I was shivering in my eagerness. Mr. Esterbrook won my father over. So I began my four year term as a machine shop apprentice. My pay was five cents an hour. Who could ask for a better chance? 

10. A good workman was likely to mistrust any tool whose metal had not been tempered by himself. But I had an even better reason for making mine: I lacked the money with which to buy them.

11. Years after I ceased to need them to earn a living those tools I made were placed display in a glass case on the observatory floor in the Chrysler Building. 

12. You see I was ambitious to do all the kinds of work at which I saw the older men engaged.

13. That was fun, but it was not half so thrilling as the work I did when we overhauled an engine. The things themselves were teaching me what I wished to know. Wished? That word is not strong enough to describe my passion to learn about machines. I was mad with curiosity. 

14. I addressed myself in almost every mail to The Scientific American. Whoever received the questions from subscribers must have thought that Walter P. Chrysler was the pen name of a dozen youths, at least half of whom were crazy. Yet many of my questions were answered. 

15. Sure I was cocky! I thought I was quite a kid. 

16. I simply had to get away. I know that now. I had to give myself a chance to be a man away from home. 

17. I think an even bigger factor was that I had not then replaced the discipline of home with self-discipline. Lacking that, any human being soon finds trouble. 

18. I wish I had not been so foolish. 

19. Most of the time, even in my own mind, I was pretty vague about what I was going to do. 

20. I found jobs in many places, yet I never seemed to find the job I hunted. Often I was broke, but if I went hungry, that was simply due to bad management. The important thing is that I have never forgotten how it feels to rove around this country hunting work. 

21. I learned something from every good mechanic with whom I worked; I learned the workings of a variety of engines; I learned shop practices; but most important, I learned a lot about men, and still more about Walter Chrysler.

22. I had more ambition then than ever. I had been studying, carrying a course in electrical engineering by mail through The International Correspondence Schools. 

23. I was a forceful, snappy young fellow, quick-tempered. That was the trouble. 

24. Mr. Hickey gave me advice. “Don’t let a fine opportunity slide by just because you are comfortable in a job that you have mastered. Don’t be afraid of your future.” 

25. Responsibility, I was learning, is something that weighs more heavily than iron. 

26. Nothing in my life has given me more cause for pride and satisfaction than the way my wife had faith in me from the very first, through all those years when I was a grease-stained roundhouse mechanic. 

27. Everything in those shops was to be in my charge. I did not worry for a second. It was a bigger job; but thanks to an abundance of self-confidence, I knew I could run it. 

28. The car was $5,000 cash. I had $700. I must confess that I never stopped to ask myself if I should, if I could afford to go in hock to buy that car. All I asked myself was: Where could I raise the money? 

29. That car had a fascination for me that seemed to others the equivalent of madness. 

30. Night after night, I worked in the barn until it was time to go to bed. Saturday afternoons and all day Sundays I worked on that car. I read automobile catalogs. I studied sketches. There was no single function I did not study over and over. I proved to myself that I knew and understood it. 

31. There is in manufacturing a creative joy that only poets are supposed to know. 

32. Finally, he said: “What salary do you want, Mr. Chrysler? 

“I just had a raise, Mr. Nash. They raised me from $8,000 to $12,000. 

I could see immediately that Charley Nash was getting ready to focus his attention on something else. His interest in me was gone; he just seemed to collapse. “In this business, we don’t pay such salaries.” He did not know me; I was an outsider. But I was not prepared to let this chance get away from me. 

“Mr. Nash, what will you pay?”

“Mr. Chrysler, we can’t afford to pay over $6,000.”

“I accept it Mr. Nash.” He looked bewildered. 

33. Certainly, my entrance into the field of automobile manufacturing was happily timed. In that year Charles F. Kettering put the first self-starter on a Cadillac and shipped it to Henry Leland. 

34. Every new thing was an invention. As soon as one problem was revealed and straightened out, twenty other problems had arisen. 

35. I cannot hope to find words to express the charm of the man [Billy Durant]. He has the most winning personality of anyone I’ve ever known. He could coax a bird right down out of a tree. 

36. Durant seated himself on the opposite side of the table. I was going to ask him for a raise. “I’ll pay you $500,000 a year to stay on here as the president of Buick.” He just sprang it on me; he did not bat an eye. I couldn’t think for a few seconds. 

37. I can accept only if I’m to have full authority. I don’t want interference. I don’t want any other boss but you. If you feel that anything is going wrong, if you don’t like some action of mine, you come to me; don’t go to anybody else and don’t try to split up my authority. Just have one channel between Flint and Detroit: from me to you. Full authority is what I want. 

38. That’s the kind of fellow he was, though, we’d fight, and then he’d want to raise my salary. The automobile industry owes more to Durant than it has yet acknowledged. In some ways, he has been its greatest man. 

39. Alfred Sloan came to see me. He tried to talk me into staying. “No, I’m washed up. I just can’t stand the way the thing is being run. All I’m anxious about now is to sell my stock.” I was going to retire. I was forty-five. I had no plans of any kind. I had given myself completely to my job for years. 

40. Once I remember leaving a meeting and saying, “I would not touch it with a ten-foot pole.” What I was saying I would not touch was later on revealed to be the greatest opportunity of my whole life. 

41. If you miss one chance, that is no reason for brooding; there will be another if you keep alert and qualify yourself for opportunities. 

42. What flexibility we had! The Chrysler car? Nobody had heard about a Chrysler car. But we had dreamed about it until it was work to think of anything else.

43. I was in the enterprise with all my heart and soul. 

44. None of my associates know the meaning of the word quit. 

45. The rules [of the New York Automobile Show] forbade allotment of space to models of a car which had not been produced and sold. Our Chrysler models were barred from the show! The men of the automobile industry always swarm in some nearby hotel. [We rented out the lobby of the hotel] Although we were not in the show, we stole it! Our models were attracting more attention than anything on display at the show.

46. The Dodge Brothers had passed away, but they left a splendid name in the industry. They had been manufacturers for whom I had great respect. In 1928, the consensus was Chrysler’s bought a lemon. That was the opinion of some minds that contained little understanding of the automobile industry. Buying Dodge was one of the soundest acts of my life. 

Learn more ideas from history's greatest entrepreneurs by listening to Founders podcast.

Read more highlights.