There are 3 things I look for when I hire people. Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them?

No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.

You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.

Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.

Obsess about the quality of the product.

In general don't start a startup you're not willing to work on for ten years.

Everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.

No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.

You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.

Execution gets divided into two key questions: 1) can you figure out what to do and 2) can you get it done.

If you don't need it yourself, and you're building something that someone else needs, realize you're at a big disadvantage.

Our lives are businesses that are sometimes run by idiots.

Hey, you know that thing Dostoyevesky wrote on gambling? It's like that. When you're surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up.

Writing for me is a kind of compulsion, so I don't think anyone could have made me do it, or prevented me from doing it.

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

The gift within the gift involved the opening of an inner eye that changed how I looked at life.

All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.

There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.

Comes the time when it's later and onto your table the headwaiter puts the bill

[My] goal as an artist is to create increasingly complex images with greater and greater clarity of form and intensity of vision.

Lady of the Mere, Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.