There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.

What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think.

Character isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.

What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.

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

I should point out that I have a picture of Asbel Kiprop as the screensaver on my phone. Is that embarrassing?

I'm in the storytelling business, and so you're always drawn to the unusual. And early on, I discovered that's the easiest way to tell stories... If you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page, and you only get something on the front page if it's unusual.