The ideas get under your skin. I am honored and deeply excited by the thought that the next generation of writers, or whomever, are influenced by these books.

The key to success in any kind of start up is your level of persistence. It's not so much your intellect. The Zuckerburg's, Pages and Brins, that succeed have such a level of belief in what they are doing that they will put up with the kind of crap that most people won't put up with, they are incredibly persistent and resilient.

Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. Focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.

If you're really driven and you want something deep, hard enough in life, you're going to get it.

News makes things black and white. Documentary filmmaking should do the opposite.

People who are reading my books, or who are thinking about it, have some general idea about the concept of strategy. They're better off than somebody that has none. So I would never say it's useless.

There's spatial intelligence. they're, which end up being, people going into math or music. there's mechanical where you work well with your hands. There's an intelligence with language that would lead someone into writing. So it's not necessarily that you're six years old and you know you're going to be a lawyer Or you're going into tech startups or computers. It's something more elemental than that. It's that this is a skill, a way of thinking that comes naturally to me that I was drawn to and it was very clear in childhood.