The people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

I write my books to challenge my own feelings and theories. Perhaps most surprising was what I learned about rice farming. It was really interesting to think of how different Asian and Western cultures are as a result of the kinds of agricultural practices that our ancestors used for thousands of years. The life of a Chinese peasant in the Middle Ages was so dramatically different from the life of a European peasant - night and day different.

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.

The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.

It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one - not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses - ever makes it alone.

There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge... It's whether our work fulfills us.