We don't like to think of ourselves as subject to the forces of the world, we like to think of ourselves as exerting that force.

My wife, there's certain kinds of housework that she just doesn't see as necessary to do in the way that I do. Things like the state of our closet or where things are in the kitchen. I have this almost unhealthily obsessive desire to have things in their place and she just totally doesn't. And this is a potential point of conflict, of course.

It's helpful to be prepared to celebrate the tiny things that you can do, where you meet the world and you negotiate an outcome that's quite tiny. But you can still make it feel remarkable.

If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say "Well what do you mean?" it's almost impossible to answer.

There are things about us that make us who we are, personality traits, or capacities that we have, or knowledge we possess or that we don't possess, habits we have that are good or bad.

You can experience play at work, not because you're messing around or wasting time or something, but because you're looking really deeply and seriously at things and asking what is possible, what can be done with them, what new ideas might emerge?

The more you're drowning in familiarity, the better the fun is. It requires less novelty to produce even more gratification. And it's something that didn't come from you. It was about the other thing - the thing you were experiencing, or the people you were with, or the mechanism you were operating, or whatever it might be.