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

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.

I was really interested in a pretty simple thing: what happens when someone tries to introduce moral considerations into Wall Street, what happens when someone wants to actually demand of himself and those who work with him that what they do is not just profitable but good and useful.

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

That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.

Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.