You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.

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.

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.

All of technology, really, is about maximizing free options.

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

Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.