No matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes.

The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation

When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.

Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you’ve decided beforehand it can’t be done.

Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.

Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and I try to get it to tell stories.

If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.

Don't trust, just verify.

Frequently in life, you have to take irrelevant paths in order to reach the correct destination.

Inez and I had been in the same book club for a while. She once told me that literary theory was reading without imagination, and I’ve loved her ever since.

What's wrong with you, Daniel? How can you laugh about these things?" And I'm like, 'Cause crying only gets you halfway there, duh.

We don't really have to make fun of religion - it makes fun of itself.

Women in my family are the center of things. All good things emanate from them. The guys usually mess up.

I definitely feel like a native New Yorker. My personality was formed there.

[Writing] is harder than you think. You'll be rejected often. If you do it for money, you'll quit. Love it or don't do it.

I've always just wanted to tell stories, and create stuff, and I think "Creator" or "Director" would probably be the two words that I go to first.

The body is the garden of the soul.

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.