Never assume that the person you are dealing with is weaker or less important than you are. Some people are slow to take offense, which may make you misjudge the thickness of their skin, and fail to worry about insulting them. But should you offend their honor and their pride, they will overwhelm you with a violence that seems sudden and extreme given their slowness to anger. If you want to turn people down, it is best to do so politely and respectfully, even if you feel their request is impudent or their offer ridiculous.

Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip.

If you want to be powerful in life you have to enjoy the process. You have to get pleasure out of making the thing that you're making. There has to be that kind of purpose behind it. If your purpose is simply gaining power, if that becomes your end in life then you end up sort of destroying yourself because you lose the sense of detachment that's very necessary.

I am impressed when I go on the internet and see a lot of young people who've been influenced by the books, or I meet someone who tells me how it has changed their life. To me, that is much more real than sales figures.

When people are too present, too familiar or too in our face, something happens to us psychologically. We begin to tune them out, we begin to get sick of them, we begin to know them so well and become so familiar with who they are that we loose a bit of respect for them. You pass a certain threshold with the fact that you're too present in their lives, too much in their face and once that threshold is passed you're never going to repair it they have lost a certain respect for you.

What I like about the internet, what I see there is that its much more democratic. I have much more control, and if what I write is liked by the public, I have immediate feedback. There are so many things I want to say - about events in the news, politics, the gamesmanship and manipulations I read about, thoughts that occur to me about the power game, advice, on and on.

It's funny how it reads like a Kubrick-inspired moment, a filmmaker controlling one's mise en scène. What it truly is is a documentary moment.