Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.

Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.

I have a new way of doing things, and I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.

Now I basically just read spy stories because they're about solving a puzzle within the constraints of history. It's the tick tock, the clockwork that I'm interested in.

We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs. Putting sixty-four transistors on a chip allowed people to dream of the future. Putting four million transistors on a chip actually gave them the future.

Character isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.

What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.