There's a certain status to suffering in Ireland, that the person who - if you're sitting around a table, the person with the greatest status is the person who had the most horrible thing happen to them most recently.

Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.

At SGI board meetings... Jim Clark's face would get red and he'd start shouting that an investor and board member had cheated him and his engineers.

A tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.

The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.

People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.

The vicious cycle that is bringing down European states is not going to hit us [the USA], at least not for a while, at the level of the federal government. The same cannot be said of state and local governments.