When it's easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent.

We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.

When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement. If a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score than a black student from an inner-city school, is it because she’s truly a better student, or is it because to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of “smart”?

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.

Why are man hole covers around?" If you don't knwo the answer to the questions, you're not smart enough to work at microsoft

All artists have to do that at a certain point. This shift that has to happen between the initial moment of creation and then the consideration of what has been created.