Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away.

What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.

When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

If you are going to do something truly innovative, you have to be someone who does not value social approval. You can't need social approval to go forward. Otherwise, how would you ever do the thing that you are doing?

Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.

When you're an underdog, you're forced to try things you would never otherwise have attempted.