What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.

We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it's next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life.

...morning is the soul's night.

You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. ... How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away.

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.