I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.

When I see someone who reads something of mine and draws something out of it that's very different from my perspective, I think that's actually cool. Sometimes it's worrisome when you feel they badly misinterpret it, but it just says that they're thinking, and they're bringing their own interpretation to bear on it. [...] That's part of the wonderful thing about putting words into the world, and if I was worried about that, I couldn't be a writer.

The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

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

The issue isn't the accuracy of the bombs you have, it's how you use the bombs you have - and more importantly, whether you ought to use bombs at all.

If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money.