There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite.

We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence.

Success is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.