Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

Activism that challenges the status quo, that attacks deeply rooted problems, is not for the faint of heart.

If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.

That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria.

It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.

An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience.