When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.

We need to be clear when we venerate entrepreneurs what we are venerating.They are not moral leaders. If they were moral leaders, they wouldn't be great businessmen.

The sad thing about doping is how much it obscures our appreciation of greatness.

In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

We have the kind of self-made-man myth, which says that super-successful people did it themselves.

I worry that track is going to enter into an impossibly complicated stage, where our understanding of the complexities of human physiology - and our ability to accentuate and exploit them - is going to make the notion of pure competition impossible.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.