It looks like I had the most irrelevant education than anybody in the planet could have.

Hasty climbers have sudden falls.

You have a set of skills, a way of looking at the world, and often in childhood it was revealed to you by things that you were just kind of naturally drawn to.

I make non-fiction partly because I'm not that good of a writer. My talent, if I have any, is in balancing, capturing and directing reality, rather than creating scenarios.

If you are armed with knowledge, if you are aware that certain dynamics are at play then you have options. You can play defense, you can ignore certain person and take the consequences perhaps with a game plan in mind and it goes on, you've increased your options.

The dreamers, those who misread the actual state of affairs and act upon their emotions, are often the source of the greatest mistakes in history-the wars that are not thought out, the disasters that are not foreseen

The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.