If you're the kind of kid who thinks that all that's important in life is making money, Wall Street is probably still the place to go, especially now that Trump's elected.

Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.

My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.

He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.

My characters are actually usually pretty smart and admirable.

You can anchor the mind into answering a question a certain way by giving them a totally unrelated piece of information dropped before.

You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book.