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

Thirdly-but not lastly-there was the bias toward what people saw with their own eyes, or thought they had seen. The human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw. There was a lot you couldn't see when you watched a game

It's such a pain in the ass to write a book, I can't imagine writing one if I'm not interested in the subject.

Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .

People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.

They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.

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.