It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one - not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses - ever makes it alone.

You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.

Trump is an innovator who has shown how out of step the political establishment was. Which I think, probably, in the long term will be healthy. We have to figure out how to reinvigorate our political institutions and he's demonstrating to us the urgency of that task.

If you're in business it's both a promise and a warning. It says that sometimes little things can cause some little guy to have an overnight success.

I think that persistence and stubbornness and hard work are probably, at the end of the day, more important than the willingness to take a risk.

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

..... it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.