There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria.

Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

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.

You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.

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.

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.