When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.

Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Alan Greenspan is unskilled; you don't take the unskilled seriously.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.