I always bring my kids vacation souvenirs printed in Comic Sans, so they know I love them but not unconditionally.

Eratosthenes, the mapmaker who was the first man to accurately measure the size of the Earth, was a librarian.

If I start outsourcing all my navigation to a little talking box in my car, I'm sort of screwed. I'm going to lose my car in the parking lot every single time.

Being a nerd really pays off sometimes.

There’s just something hypnotic about maps.

For me, it started as a child with one of those little wooden jigsaw maps of the U.S., wheres theres crocodiles on Florida and apples on Washington state. That was my very first map.

It's boring to have the same guy win. I'm actively rooting against myself.

You live overseas, you see these exotic places and you want to know about them. But, weirdly, it also made me homesick for all these very prosaic places in America.

The thing you like/are good at is a sacred thing.

We don't realize how hard it was to drive anywhere outside the major cities less than a century ago.

I always feel a certain sense of reverence in libraries, even small city ones that smell like homeless internet users.

Watch them describe you to somebody else and see how it long it takes for them to bring up your physical description that'll tell you all.

My feeling, based on my own experience, is that aiming for grandiosity is the fastest route to failure.

The land of unlimited opportunity was for me, for a long time, impossible to reach. The wall, barbed wire and the order to shoot at those who tried to leave limited my access to the free world.

To execute a man we don't need proof of his guilt. We only need proof that it's necessary to execute him. It's that simple.

My parents had a difficult divorce.

Music is art to me, and you don't censor art. You don't go into a museum and censor things.

I have sworn with my tongue, but my mind is unsworn. [Lat., Juravi lingua, mentem injuratem gero.]

There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.

Award shows, like the Grammys, were tough on us early in hip-hop, not even televising our categories or splitting them up on best male or female or any of that. We had to earn them.

Messi is probably the best player of the last 20 years.