People found it unusual to leave a job where you're the boss.

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

I know I would have learned a huge amount had I read the bible with my rabbi. But I also would have missed a huge amount, and I would have been guided down the narrow paths where the rabbi led me, not the paths that I chose for myself.

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.

Any suggestion that Mexicans are fundamentally different from Americans should be taken as racist on its face; America, after all, is a pluralistic society, and Mexico is hardly the alien civilization that some (really, just Samuel Huntington) would suggest.

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.

Writing a column, a weekly column for the New York Times, is really tough, and I wasn't prepared for the demands that that involved.