When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.

We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.

The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.

If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.

The successful are those who have been given opportunities.

An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.

There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria.

Outlier are those who have been given opportunities-- -and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

When you're an underdog, you're forced to try things you would never otherwise have attempted.

If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.

Nothing draws people more quickly away from religion than an open mind.

By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.

It's a big part of my life, listening to music and watching TV.

Every politician - FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama - they're all conservative by nature. They are part of the big thing and they're moving in a very constrained world.

God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.

Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think.

When a child dies, it breaks the pattern, the most fundamental pattern in life.

Teaching is a calling too. And I've always thought that teachers in their way are holy - angels leading their flocks out of the darkness.

True thoughts have duration in themselves. If the thoughts endure, the seed is enduring; if the seed endures, the energy endures; if the energy endures, then will the spirit endure.

The man who has the sense of the body being himself cannot possibly worship God as formless; whatever worship he makes will be worship in form alone, not otherwise.