You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?

Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.

What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.

If you're in business it's both a promise and a warning. It says that sometimes little things can cause some little guy to have an overnight success.

The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.