Nobody accomplishes success by themselves.

Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?

Our intuitions, as humans, aren't always very good. Changes that happen really suddenly, on the strength of the most minor of input, can be deeply confusing.

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

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.

I'm a purist: I start to wrinkle my nose when the Cold War ends.

I always resist seeing my own personal motivation in my work, but I guess it must be there on some level. And I do feel very much that my life follows the kinds of things I talk about in my books. I've always thought of myself as an insanely lucky person, so perhaps the success of my first two books led me to want to examine this phenomenon on some unconscious level.