I have blocks of time where I'm working intently on something.

The Christians think I am making a mistake by not trying the New Testament and meeting Jesus. The Jews tend to think I am making a mistake by reading without support from educated people. After all, there is 2,000 years of scholarship about the book, they say, so it's perverse of me to ignore it.

One problem with how we think about the Bible is that people tend to jam it into narrower categories, when in fact it is many things all at once.

When you have spent too much time with something, you may lose sight of what's marvelous about it.

On one project I was hanging out with Brad Pitt, and Ryan Gosling, and Steve Carrel, and Christian Bale, and trying to explain economics to them for a movie I'm an advisor on.

When you're writing for the New York Times someone reading it knows the topic better than you do and knows when you've messed up.

The process of just being in front of people, having to stand up for your ideas, and ask - and then ask people for money, which is a very hard thing to do.